


Sissi Delmas and the Wonderful World of Lyoko

by SoulJelly



Category: Code Lyoko
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Romance, Female Friendship, Female-Centric, Friendship, Gen, Minor Character(s), Romance, What-If
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-18
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-09 10:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1980270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoulJelly/pseuds/SoulJelly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you discovered the girl in the computer, what would you do? A short 'what if?' story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Absolutely, Positively the Worst

It was, without a doubt, the fifth or sixth absolute worst day in Sissi Delmas' entire life.

To make matters even worse, she had no one to blame but herself, although a good case could be made for a certain Odd Della Robbia shouldering some responsibility. She'd only known him for two days and yet somehow he'd gotten her into this mess, ruining her plans for a good start to the new school year. Speaking of Della Robbia...

"Hey, Sissi! You there? Yooo hooo!"

Even over the phone, his voice sounded intolerably cheerful, though that was probably something to do with the fact that he was safe and warm in his dormitory whilst she stood outside facing howling wind and pouring rain. Sissi tried to stop shivering, hunching her shoulders up around her ears, and practically growling into the mobile she clutched between achingly numb fingers.

"Shut up," she hissed. "I'm here."

"Sweet." His voice dripped with barely contained glee. "Think you'll last the night?"

Sissi snorted. "Of course I will, idiot. What do you take me for?"

"Eh," he said, and she could hear the shrug in his voice. "I dunno, it's a pretty strong wind out there tonight. With all the air in that head of yours, you might just be blown away if you're not careful!"

He burst out laughing, rather obnoxiously considering it was his own joke, Sissi thought, and in the background she could hear Ulrich sniggering. Her scowl deepened and she thought about hanging up, storming back to Kadic and kicking that purple-dressed moron's butt, but... that would mean losing the bet, which would mean further humiliation, and a crushed dream to boot.

Instead, Sissi replied dryly, "Real funny, Della Robbia."

"Thanks!"

She rolled her eyes.

"Whatever. All right, I'm about to go in."

"What's it like in there?" Odd asked. "Is it scary? You know, I've never seen the place at night. I heard it's haunted, and-"

"It's an old, empty factory. That's it. Besides, didn't you just transfer here? I think you're a bit too new to the place to be coming up with urban legends so soon."

Sissi smirked at the long pause that followed, Odd obviously stuck for a witty response.

"Yeah, well," he said eventually. "I've got Ulrich here too. Ulrich's been living here as long as you have."

Sissi just shook her head and laughed. Still, she trembled with cold, and as she stared into the shadowy darkness of the factory she felt the hairs rise up uncomfortably on the back of her neck, even under her thickest cashmere scarf.

She wasn't afraid, though. She couldn't be. If she did this, if she lasted the night in the old factory, Ulrich would be impressed for sure. She'd prove to him that she was a good sport, not the stuck-up, boring airhead he thought she was.

"Much as I'd love to chat a dork like you for the rest of the night," said Sissi, "I'm going to go and do a little exploring."

"Brave of you. You've got your camera?"

"Obviously. A time-stamped photo every hour to prove I've stayed the whole night. Easy."

"Well," Odd said. Sissi had a vision of him suddenly, wrapped up in blankets (possibly with a mug of hot chocolate pilfered from the school cafeteria before closing time), with that god-awful ugly mutt of his sprawled on his lap, a grin a mile wide on his face. She grimaced. "Good luck!" he told her brightly. "See you tomorrow. If the ghosts don't get you..."

Sissi swore at him, and she just had time to hear Odd's exclamation of surprise before she ended the call.

She paused for a moment at the factory's entrance, feeling the rumble of thunder echo loudly in the blank dark sky. A moment later a fork of lightning illuminated the city for the briefest of moments, throwing into sharp relief all the thousands of swiftly pouring raindrops.

Then Sissi Delmas took a deep breath, turned from the view, and walked into the building.

It was stupid, really. One conversation with Odd Della Robbia on the very first day of school (he'd tried to _flirt_ with her! What a total loser, he didn't stand a chance) somehow led to a conversation in which Ulrich had mumbled "leave it, she's boring anyway," and then Odd had tossed his long, stringy hair over his shoulder, turned to Sissi and told her that, if she'd stay the night in the old abandoned factory across the river, Ulrich would go on a date with her.

Ulrich had yelled his protests and flatly refused, but Odd had winked and said he'd make it happen.

Sissi had agreed to do it.

She had tried to make out that it wasn't about the date, or at least not as much as she let on, but more about proving it for her own sake. Nicholas and Hervé had offered to accompany her but she had sharply refused, to which they looked more than a little relieved.

"I don't need an entourage, you know," she'd told them, making no effort to hide her irritation as they followed her out of the classroom when the bell rang, trailing so close on her heels that she couldn't have turned around without bumping into either of them. Over the roar of noise that accompanied the lesson switch-over, she had heard Odd laughing up ahead, Ulrich mumbling something disdainfully.

Mrs Hertz began to wipe the blackboard clean. Snatches of a conversation filtered through as Sissi, Nicholas and Hervé left the room.

"Jérémie, thank you for staying behind," the science teacher was saying. "Just a quick word. I was talking to some friends of mine up at the university and they've donated some old parts. I thought you might find them useful for those miniature robots you were working on..."

The door had closed on Jérémie Belpois' reply; not that Sissi cared anyway.

That bright September morning, the fading afterglow of a remarkable summer, now seemed a million years away. The cold reality of the present moment pulled Sissi back from the memory, the scowl never leaving her face as she crossed her arms over her chest.

Stupid dare. Stupid girly-looking new kid. Stupid self, if she didn't do this.

The floor she was standing on ended a little ways in, the steps leading down to the lower level half crumbled away so the few that remained lead futilely into thin air, and she sat on on a ledge with her feet swinging over the edge of it. Someone had improvised ropes, tied tightly to some invisible spot in the ceiling, and she could quite easily grab hold of one and swing down into the compound below.

Not that she wanted to. Rope burn? No thanks, not Sissi Delmas. Not if you paid her. Not even for Ulrich Stern.

Reluctantly Sissi took her hands from her pockets, where they had been trying to stay warm, and checked her phone for the time. The screen lit up, a tiny square of blue, and it was a quarter to midnight. She put her phone back in her pocket as she rested her chin on her hands, heaving a sigh that echoed astonishingly loudly in the vast, empty space. It wouldn't be so bad really, Sissi thought, if she had a friend who could come with her. Someone cool, and nice, not the incredibly dorky, overbearing members of the Sissi Fanclub (all two of them).

The clouds covering the moon drifted, the slanting windows in the roof allowing silver light to pour in. The floor of the compound was suddenly illuminated, light chasing shadows to make patterns of the structures below – rusted scaffolding, weeds forcing their way through cracks in the walls. An elevator.

She couldn't imagine this place as a bustling car factory. Probably because she'd never seen a car factory before.

Still, it was difficult to imagine this place as _anything_ but a wreck; Sissi thought it strange that many years ago this place was dust-free and brightly-lit, and people came in here every morning to go to work. She wondered what events had led to it falling into ruin.

Compulsively, her hand reached for her mobile phone once more. She growled at it and considered dropping it over the ledge at the harsh truth it told her; that it had just turned midnight. Seven hours to go, or thereabouts, until it got light.

Sissi heaved a sigh. The amusement at realising she could see her breath when she exhaled distracted her for only a few minutes, until she began to notice the loss of feeling in her feet; her canvas shoes were soaked with rain and she sorely regretting not putting on at least another three pairs of socks. The night sounds around her were infuriating; the rain was a static-like constant, the water dripping rhythmically from the ceiling enough to set her nerves on edge. The emergency chocolate bar in Sissi's other pocket was soon demolished, but a little too swiftly; by the last bite she felt thirsty and slightly sick.

"I can't do this," Sissi said to herself, scrunching up the empty food wrapper and heaving herself to her feet. "Ulrich, I hope you don't mind the cold because you're going to be holding hands with a human popsicle on our date if I don't warm up in a minute."

The thought of the date sparked some energy into her and she began to stomp her feet on the spot. The action transformed into pacing back and forth, then walking the length of the walkway which stretched around the perimeter of the factory floor, racing off into the shadows. Somewhere along to the right was another flight of steps, sturdy and intact this time.

Hesitating only briefly when she reached these, Sissi shrugged to herself and took a step downwards into middle of the factory.

Like the walkway, this floor continued indefinitely in either direction with nothing much of interest besides the elevator, which looked broken. Sissi cast her eyes away from the shadows, afraid of what might be lingering there. The more her mind was allowed to race, occupied with nothing but its own macabre thoughts (and these fuelled in turn by hundreds of horror movies), the more ridiculous the concept of what she was doing became.

"There could be anything down here," she mumbled. The sound of her own voice was reassuring and so she kept talking as she went. "A cult waiting for someone they can use for a ritual sacrifice, or a murderer on the run, or... no, wait, I'm starting to creep myself out."

She moved closer to the wall. One hand ran across the cold stone and metal, the other clutched her mobile in her pocket. All the while Sissi's head was raised and alert. She didn't go more than a few steps without looking over her shoulder.

There was another entry through into the factory through the sewers, it seemed. The stench hit her as soon as she shouldered open the metal door, forcing her to recoil immediately with her hands clasped over her face. She forced the door back into place and walked quickly away.

"Huh. You won't get _me_ travelling through any sewers," she called defiantly. "And if anything happens to me here, it's all your fault, Odd Della Robbia," she said. Then, more quietly and with a soft, wistful sigh, "I wish you were here with me, Ulrich."

Her mind drifted then from the scary thoughts to how this would be different if she wasn't alone. She'd be able to make jokes about mutated factory workers and ritual sacrifices, ghost stories and axe murderers, with the steady reassurance of another presence to keep her sane, another face and voice lending humour to her wild speculations. Ulrich would be brave. He would hold her hand, whisper support in her ear, and circumstances – she wasn't sure what they would be exactly – but circumstances would force him to remove his shirt, after, of course, he insisted they hug to share body heat...

Sissi smiled to herself, the thought putting a spring in her step-

Until she stepped in a puddle.

She shrieked as icy water sloshed over her foot, a miniature tidal wave crashing against her shoes and beginning to seep mercilessly into her socks. Sissi's frustration came hissed through clenched teeth, nausea churning her stomach as she thought about the sewer water, the slime and fungus, all the grossest things lurking in this dreadful, neglected place.

Absolutely the worst.

She thought about texting Odd. A dozen drafts of messages flittered through her mind – _I hate you; Just wait until I tell my father about this; You are the worst person I've ever met;_ but such vitriol was pointless. For one thing, Odd would feel he'd won. Ulrich would lose all respect for her. Plus if any of their classmates found out she'd be practically laughed out of the school.

Maybe she would mess with him a little bit...

But her frozen fingers would barely move to tap out a message, so she thought the better of it. Instead, she kicked angrily at a piece of debris as she passed, only for tears to spring up her in eyes as she stubbed her toe.

Sissi walked on, limping now slightly with her injured foot, anger mingling with her fear until she didn't know what was driving her to continue forward. She just wanted the hours to pass until she could go home, change into clean, dry clothes, and go to bed.

For what felt like hours she explored, dozens of old boxes and machine parts revealing themselves under the light of her phone, held as an impromptu torch. Why, Sissi asked herself despairingly, hadn't she bothered to bring a torch? Her entire make-up bag, a magazine, a bouncy ball, her diary and best pens... yet no torch or survival equipment.

Sissi blamed her father. He was never very good at packing either.

Her movements became automatic, her eyes picking out shapes in the gloom enough to avoid most of the cracks and faults in the floor tiles, her hands darting out of the way of dripping fungus and insects which scrambled away at her approach. Her frayed nerves had her jolting at every little sound and she had to force her mind away from the trains of thought it wandered down. The darkness was oppressive, as suffocating as the stale stench of the air, and she thought her heart would never stop racing.

She decided to turn back, hoping she was going the right way. There was a pile of old parts in her way, heavy sacks filled with rusting bolts which spilled out onto the floor, stuck there forever amongst a pool of spilled varnish. As before, Sissi made to clamber over them.

Something moved before she did.

She froze; this sound was clearer than those of her own imaginings, closer than the creaking of old metal and the distant late-night traffic outside. Her mobile battery was draining but the blue light shone weakly, cutting a feeble hole through the shadows.

The rats were everywhere.

Their eyes gleamed in the weak light, their tails swishing like worms over the dirty floor. Sissi's scream caught in her throat; she froze, unable to move so much as an arm, simply staring at the creatures that now barred her way.

One of them squeaked.

She ran.

They scattered as she plunged forward, eliciting more squeaks which, thankfully, faded as she put more and more distance between herself and the creatures, her feet pounding and her wet socks squelching uncomfortably in her shoes.

In her blind panic, the factory felt like a labyrinth. Tears stung her eyes as she ran, bursting through doorway after doorway, tripping over obstacles. Her entire body crawled with the feeling of them, their matted fur and scratchy, fleshy paws. She had to get away, from this, from everything.

At last, she burst out onto the main floor of the compound, barely stopping to feel the burning ache of every muscle, her body on fire from the effort of running. Sissi was almost free, desperate now for clean, fresh air.

Except, where were the steps that led back up to the entrance? She couldn't remember. She knew that they were there in the darkness somewhere but she as stumbled blindly in the shadows her panic only mounted.

"Stupid, stupid," she muttered to herself in between breaths which now tore painfully at her lungs.

There was more scratching, clanking; her heart felt like it would burst through her chest at the sounds. Wiping away her tears with one clenched fist – they had been running silently down her face, which was now also streaked with grime – she forced herself to stop and think.

There was no other way up that she could see, other than...

Sissi turned. Maybe the elevator would take her upstairs. It would be free from the rats at least. She hoped.

They keypad had looked broken, she remembered. _Maybe I don't need it._

There was one other button, a red circle. Without a second thought, Sissi pressed it. The elevator doors opened creakily, frustratingly slowly, but the space inside was clean, though freezing cold. Sissi ran inside, leaning against the wall and watching the compound disappear before her as the doors closed.

She knew immediately that she had been wrong. The lift was beginning to sink downwards. Down, past the ground floor of the factory (beneath the surface of the lake, she realised with a cold stab of fear), deep into the earth. The elevator was old and and moved slowly as though lowering itself even an inch took an immense amount of effort. The descent seemed to go on forever, until Sissi was breathing hard, fighting the mounting anxiety that told her she would simply go on forever, down and down and down...

The elevator stopped.

It landed heavily and Sissi stumbled with the shock of it, bracing her hand against the door to stop her fall. There was the sound of something spinning, clicking, before they finally opened.

The room was pitch black and it was a while before her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Only then could she make out dim shapes; The room was fairly plain, quite small, with a dish-shaped structure in the ceiling and walls made up of mismatched panels. She spotted the lever, fixed to the wall on her right, and she grinned triumphantly. Hope bubbled up in her, an balm against the fear.

"Here we are! Sissi Delmas, you genius. You've found the power source. Or at least, I sure hope so." It looked kind of like the set of switches Jim went to look at if he ever needed to fix a blown fuse at school, with the little box covering the lever and everything. If this was the power source for the whole factory, she could maybe get some real electricity going. Scare off those rats, find somewhere dry to make herself comfortable until morning.

Either that or the whole place would blow up inexplicably for no reason.

Sissi shrugged. She never claimed to know anything about science.

"I hope I'm not going to regret this," she said, to no one in particular.

She reached for the lever, clasped it in both hands and pulled it down.

And the room came to life.

It glowed white, electricity flooding the lights in the ceiling. Something began to rise from a sealed hatch in the floor, energy flowing through its channels and wires like blood through veins as it unfolded in three sections, a great tiered, mechanical beast, with the screeching sound of metal upon metal which had Sissi clasping her hands to her ears. At last the noise ground to a halt. It was a while, though, until her heart stopped thudding. She waited, pressed instinctively against the wall... for what, she wasn't sure.

When she was finally quite certain that there were no immediate, obvious consequences to switching on the power, she took a deep breath and turned back to the elevator. All there was left now was to see what had happened upstairs.

She only went up one floor.

The elevator doors began to open before Sissi realised it, and it opened into a room harsh and yellow with artificial light. Her eyes were wide as she took in the sight before her, her footsteps slow and quiet as she walked half-reluctantly into the centre of the room.

She had a terrible sense of foreboding, standing in the centre of those mysterious cylinders.

They were smooth and white with a barely visible join running down the centre of each one, indicating that they opened by both panels sliding apart. They stood, imposing and silent. Like upright coffins, she thought.

Perhaps with something already inside.

A violent shudder tore through her suddenly. Sissi felt vulnerable, standing in the middle of that eerie trinity, overwhelmed with the urge to escape.

What was this? Who would create it, and why?

She took a step back and made for the elevator once more. As the doors slid shut behind her, hiding the foreboding structures from view, Sissi wrapped her arms tightly about herself. Something about those weird things had unsettled her deeply. There was something else though; in the clean, crisp whiteness of them, the wires spreading from them every which way, there was a sense of something... futuristic. Something out of the ordinary, ahead of its time.

The computer on the floor above didn't look too shabby either.

That was what she found next, doubling back in the elevator which had taken her immediately three floors down, then two, instead of one. She tried not to think about this, about who or what had programmed the elevator to take her directly to that spooky room which held the power.

It sat innocuously in the centre of the room, screen blank and black, as normal, at first glance, as any office computer. Except it was more slimline, the closer she looked; compact and yet hugely complex with switches and buttons, two small screens one either side of the main one. Like the cylinders in the floor below, it was something not out of place in a science fiction movie. In fact, she thought maybe she'd seen something like it in a film before.

"A supercomputer," Sissi whispered.

There was a chair, too. It sat facing her as though it was waiting.

She strode over to it and sat down, enjoying the sudden relief of taking the weight off her feet, but startled by the chair spinning around of its own accord. Lights on the computer were now glowing; all Sissi needed to do was switch on the monitor.

She did so, studying the screen with its various windows opening like pop-up ads, the green background pulsating slightly with some strange animation effect.

It was a few moments before the girl appeared.

She was fast asleep, or so it seemed, head lolling gently on her chin and her eyes closed. Sissi stared at her, everything else momentarily forgotten. In the dead silence, the figure slept on peacefully.

Sissi screamed.

The sound flew from her mouth of its own accord; she had becoming so used, in the last few hours, to being afraid. Anticipating creeping, lurking faces behind every corner, her mind a tumult of emotions, whilst the rats yet lingered in her mind with fear making the memories sharper. All this, and coming unexpectedly face to face with another person was finally enough to push her over the edge. She stammered, eyes frozen on the screen, curled up in the computer chair with every muscle pulled taut, her heart once again hammering.

The figure on the screen woke up.

Her eyes opened, blinked once, twice, and her head shot up in alarm, whirling from side to side. The look of surprise and panic on her features was evident, mirroring Sissi's, who had now shrunk back in the computer chair with her hands over her mouth.

"Who... who are you?" the girl on the screen asked. "Where am I?"

Sissi blinked. "You can see me? And hear me?"

"Well, yes." Her voice was young and pleasant-sounding beneath the fear, musical almost, wary yet light with curiosity. "Do you know what I'm doing here?"

"I don't- there was this computer, and I just switched it on, and... Who are you?" asked Sissi.

"I... don't know."

"Oh."

There was a slight pause at this; the girl in the computer still looked confused and was staring about her as though drinking in every detail whatever place she was in on the other side of the screen. Now that Sissi's panic had started to subside, she could study the other girl more closely.

She looked like a cartoon character, was her conclusion. Pink hair, pointy ears, that weird earring. Huge green eyes that examined Sissi with an almost scientific scrutiny. Sissi, meanwhile, had completely forgotten about her own dishevelled appearance – something that surely paid testament to the weirdness of the situation.

"ODD!" Sissi screamed, pulling back to yell at the ceiling, ignoring the computer girl's flinch. "ODD DELLA ROBBIA. This isn't funny. What kind of trick are you playing here you dork?!"

Her bellowed words reverberated in the quiet room as Sissi breathed deeply, scanning the room critically for something to give him away; a discarded purple hoodie, or that mutt. She took in the complex tangles of wires, the strange dish beside the computer, the computer itself, state-of-the-art beneath the dust.

She _knew_ Odd couldn't have done this.

For one thing, he'd only just got here. For another, he was no way smart enough.

The thought cheered Sissi, and she turned back to the girl in the computer, smiling.

"I don't know what this is, but it isn't a prank," Sissi concluded.

"I... yes." The girl made no effort to hide her confusion; all of her emotions in fact, sat plain on her face. Sissi was surprised to find she could read the stranger like a book.

"And you're not in on this," she added, nodding proudly at her own deducation.

"No... I don't know anything. I just... woke up."

"When the computer started up," said Sissi. Then, "Oh! I get it. You must be some kind of... what are they called... artificial intelligence thingies."

"Yes," the other girl agreed. "That could be it."

"Well, anyway," Sissi said, warming to her theme now, "my name's Sissi. I go to Kadic Academy, not too far from here, and I'm the principal's daughter."

"Nice to meet you."

Sissi blinked. It was strange to hear someone her own age greet her so nicely. The usual boast of her status as principal's daughter didn't do much to impress the artificial intelligence, but she had met the introduction with interest, not scorn. And though she was making every effort to be friendly, she still looked so lost... Sissi couldn't help but like her. The feeling of instantly warming to someone was, too, unfamiliar, but not unpleasant.

"Nice to meet you too," Sissi said, finding that she really meant it. "What should I call you?" As she said it, her gaze alighted on something on the screen, a little line of text above the window that bore the girl's face. One word, something she tried out in her head before she spoke aloud so that it wouldn't get tangled, unfamiliar as the sound was on her tongue.

"No, wait. I think..." Sissi tilted her head to the side, examining the name on the screen. "I think your name is Aelita."

It had a strange effect on the girl. Her mouth parted in a slight gasp and her eyes lit up in recognition, as though part of a puzzle had suddenly slipped into place and couldn't have been any more obvious.

"Yes," she said, nodding slowly. "Yes, that's right. I'm... Aelita. I don't know why, but I know it."

As Aelita was pondering this discovery, Sissi began to scan the various windows that had appeared on the screen. None of it mean much to her and she pulled a face at the lines of code and incomprehensible text. Something stood out though, amongst the technical things, and Sissi leaned forward to read it.

"It looks like a whole other kind of... virtual reality. I think it's called _Lyoko_ , where you are."

Aelita nodded, satisfied with this answer. "Lyoko, huh? Okay. Is there anything that explains what I'm doing here on this virtual world?"

Sissi shook her head. "I don't understand any of this stuff." She caught a glimpse of the other girl's disappointed face and ducked her head, twisting a strand of hair nervously in her fingers, suddenly guilty. "Sorry."

"It's... it's okay."

"What does it look like, in there?" Sissi asked.

Aelita explained about the cylindrical room she found herself in. The quiet, the lines of code running down walls which gave off an ethereal glow, the perpetual sense of something shifting even though she sat quite still, on a blue and white ringed platform that hovered over black nothingness.

"Is there no way out?"

She shrugged. "I can't see any doors. Should I go and explore?" Standing, Aelita made to walk away from the small interface in front of her.

Sissi's heart leapt. She slammed a palm on the side of the monitor, almost toppling out of her chair as she moved as though to pull the girl back. "Wait!"

The girl turned and Sissi faltered.

"Just..." the dark-haired girl said quietly, "Just don't leave me, okay?"

Sissi squeezed her eyes closed in the pause that followed. When she opened her eyes she fully expected Aelita to have scoffed at the request and left.

She cracked her eyes open again, then slumped back in her chair. She had been wrong.

Aelita sat down, cross-legged in front of the small interface, one hand resting lightly on her kneecap and the other supporting her chin. Sissi wrapped her arms around both knees on the computer chair, feet resting on the ledge which held the keypad.

"Okay. I'll stay."

"You will? Th-Thanks." Sissi shook herself, steeling her composure to mask the fear and uncertainty, and continued boldly, "It's not like I'm scared or anything. It's just that I may as well have someone to talk to while I'm waiting around."

"What are you waiting for?"

"Morning. Then I'll win the bet and that'll be that. Oh, I can't wait to see Della Robbia's _face_."

Aelita was staring at her blankly. It was a moment before Sissi noticed.

"I suppose I should explain."

It was the beginning of a conversation that lasted through the night, meandering through topics with growing ease until Sissi's eyes began to drift closed.

She had never spent as long in front of a computer screen; nor had she ever slept in a computer chair, and her joints ached in protest when she finally awoke.

The rain had stopped and outside birds could be heard singing. It was morning at last.

Sissi stirred groggily, rubbing the back of her neck. Her hair was sticking up in all directions, eyes red-rimmed with sleep gathered in the corners. Memories flooded through her which she didn't have time to process and then she was heaving herself out of the chair in one swift, though painful, movement. Aelita's face could still be seen on the computer screen.

"What day it is it?" Sissi asked her frantically. "What time?"

Aelita on the other hand, looked stricken. "Sissi, what happened? You just switched off, like you'd shut down or something. I was calling and calling and you didn't respond-"

Sissi wasn't listening.

"No no no no. I have to get back to school. I have a class right now! If anyone realises I'm missing I'll be in detention for a year!" she was rambling as she sought her bag, wincing as she slung it over her aching shoulder. She was running for the elevator even as she spoke, slamming one hand emphatically on the button."Listen, Aelita, I'll come back and talk to you later, I just really have to-"

The doors closed on her reply, leaving Aelita alone in the room with only the sound of the supercomputer for company.

"Goodbye, Sissi," she said quietly, eyebrows furrowed in perplexity.

She placed her hand on the interface, called up a sheet of data, and began to read.

Sissi launched herself from the elevator, made a beeline for the steps (how could she have missed them last night? The sunlight streaming through the roof made everything clear, and she vaguely took in the places she had walked the night before) and leapt them two at a time. She ran the length of the bridge, bag bumping against her back and shoulder.

She was so late. She was in so much trouble.

But Sissi Delmas' heart was just a little lighter, because she had emerged victorious, with a new friend and a secret.

...

In the factory, in the darkest, gloomiest places where even the brightest rays of sunlight could never quite reach, something stirred.


	2. Keeping Secrets

Sissi burst into the classroom forty five minutes late and, on reflection, this was a bad idea.

Louise Meyer's chalk scratched painfully down the blackboard at the unexpected entrance, marring the equation _y=ax+b_ with a messy white line. She took one look at Sissi and, in that quiet, deadpan way that's more threatening than a shouted reprimand because it means you're in deep trouble and the worst is yet to come, the maths teacher simply said;

"Wait outside."

Sissi swallowed nervously. She chanced a quick glance around the room,catching the eyes of more than a few students in the process (the ones who weren't taking naps behind their textbooks had all, naturally, turned to stare at her as she entered). Ignoring Odd and Ulrich's questioning stares, she nodded, closing the door after her with a muttered apology.

On the other side of the closed door, class resumed. Sissi leaned against the wall in the quiet corridor, mindful of the bulletin board behind her advertising cheerleading and soccer tryouts, and closed her eyes.

The events of the night before and of that morning were blended together in her mind in a near-seamless blur, punctuated only with the succumbing to sleep and the waking afterwards, during which she felt no time had passed between. Now that she had time to take stock of herself however, the frantic sprint back over the bridge and through the woods over, she became uncomfortably aware of all her aches and pains. The stiffness in her back and shoulders was accompanied by a dull, throbbing ache in her left foot where she vaguely recalled stubbing her toe the night before. She knew without even a mirror that her hair looked a sight, her make-up not much better, and now that she was back in the overwhelmingly ordinary setting of school, the Sissi Delmas who cared about these things returned to the forefront.

There was a clock on the opposite wall. Sissi watched the seconds ticking away for a moment or so, then pushed herself upright and away from the classroom without a second glance. Standing around only to get yelled at was pointless, and whatever, she was in trouble today already.

"I hate maths anyway," she said aloud as she strode deliberately down the hallway.

It was cool and quiet inside the girls' bathroom. The blue tiles and the mirrors were still fogged up with steam from the morning's showers and Sissi ran a hand over condensation-saturated glass as scrutinused her reflection. She splashed water on her face, shivering at the coldness of it but instantly feeling more alert. This area of the building was always empty during school hours, so Sissi had no trouble sneaking up to her dorm room to grab her washbag and towel.

She let the shower water run hot, testing the temperature with her foot before stepping under the spray. For the tiniest moment the lights flickered. Sissi blinked, and when her eyes opened the room was fully lit again.

/

"Ms Meyer's looking for you," was the first thing Odd said when Sissi strode up to their table, just in time for the start of second period. She stuck her hands on her hips and tossed her hair, thankfully back to its conditioned, glossy state, over her shoulder.

"Oh well," she said. "I'll go and get yelled at later. More importantly, I think you two boys should be congratulating me since I won your little bet."

"Did you really?" Odd seemed surprised.

"That's right."

"Not bad, Sissi. I admit, I didn't think you had it in you. Have you got the evidence?"

Sissi's good mood instantly evaporated. She'd forgotten all about the time-stamped photographs and by the way Odd smirked, it must have been written all over her face.

"Without the evidence-" Odd began.

"Oh, come on!" Sissi exclaimed. "Are you saying I'm lying?"

"Well-"

What promised to be a decidedly nasty argument was suddenly brought to halt by Ulrich's fist slamming down on the desk.

"Shut up, both of you. Sissi, I don't care if you won the dare or not. I'm still not going on a date with you."

Odd smirked even wider and Sissi narrowed her eyes.

"As for you, Della Robbia-" Ulrich turned in his seat to face Odd. "You can stop following me around like a lost puppy and pulling me into your stupid schemes, got it?"

Odd's face fell and it was Sissi's turn to sneer behind Ulrich's back.

The conversation was brought to swift end as class began. No sooner had Mrs Hertz instructed them on their latest experiment and brought out the equipment, then the chatter rose again from all around the room and Odd carried on the conversation as though there had been no interruption.

"Anyway, we're forgetting the most important thing here." He leaned back in his seat, arms folded behind his head. "Provided you really went into the factory of course. What was it like in there? Did you find anything cool?"

Sissi struggled to keep her expression neutral. This was the moment. The secret bubbled up inside her, threatening to overspill. How impressed Ulrich would be when he found out what she'd discovered! She was so close to having him notice her, _really_ notice her. Sissi opened her mouth, the words on her lips.

Then she caught sight of Odd's face, and Ulrich, hunched over his notebook and pretending not to be interested, and a thought struck her, something that had, she supposed, been brewing in the back of her mind in some sense ever since she had first met Aelita.

It was a little seed of doubt, growing by the second in this definitive moment. Her word, her decision to reveal her secret, was the only thing changing the balance of this outcome. As Sissi left the table with the excuse of gathering supplies at the front of the classroom, she thought about it, and thought about it some more.

She would tell them. She would tell them everything and convince them to believe her, and they would laugh as they took the old elevator downwards, until the doors opened on the supercomputer and then their faces would turn from mocking sceptism to shock and awe.

_"What the...?" Odd would be, in a rare and precious moment, speechless. Ulrich would say nothing but immediately walk over to the supercomputer, hand reaching out to run along the keyboard as though touch was the only thing that would convince him it was real._

_He would be startled by a quiet, gentle voice greeting him._

_"Hello?" Aelita would say. Then, perhaps, "Sissi, are you there?"_

_Sissi would stride up, nudge past Ulrich and sit in the chair as though she had been doing it all her life. "Hi, Aelita," she would say, relishing the confused glances Odd and Ulrich were exchanging in the corner of her eye. "I'd like you to meet two people from my school. This is Ulrich Stern, and this is" – rather less enthusiastically – "Odd Della Robbia."_

_Odd and Ulrich would be on either side of her now, peering at the screen._

_"Woah, a supercomputer_ and _a cute chick," Odd would say. Aelita would put a hand to her mouth and smile. Odd would be spurred on immediately, turning on the charm. Suddenly Sissi would be nudged out of the way, somehow shifted from the chair, somehow excluded from this trio, and it would be Odd and Ulrich excitedly asking questions._

_"So, you're Aelita huh? You're like some kind of artificial intelligence?"_

_"That's right."_

_"Wow that's so cool! So what's it like living in a computer?"_

_So on, and so forth. Sissi would feel the conversation leaving her, growing distant, Aelita's face obscured by the backs of the two boys' heads. Aelita would say something and Ulrich would laugh (Sissi could never make him do that!) and Odd would add some quip. Aelita wouldn't even glance in Sissi's direction. Then the barbs would start._

_"Hey it's a good job we met you Aelita! It would have been some serious bad luck for you to be stuck in this computer with only Sissi to talk to! She's so boring you'd probably just shut yourself down out of sheer desperation!"_

_The chorus of laughter that followed would ring in her ears... She would never go back..._

"So," Odd prompted when Sissi returned with an armful of test tubes. "Anything in there?"

Sissi shook her head. "Nothing, really. Just a load of old junk."

Odd pouted. "Trust you not to find anything actually _interesting_ , Delmas."

/

When Ms Meyer finally caught up with her, Sissi was given lunchtime detention for the rest of the week.

Considering detentions were run by Jim, who took the opportunity to put his feet up and take refuge in a fitness magazine, it wasn't a terrible punishment so much as a tedious one. Sissi sat in the library with her chin in her hands, staring at the spines of books lining the shelves in front of her. On the desk were a pile of half-finished doodles in pink pen, wonky depictions of a messy-haired girl with pointy ears, which were eventually swept carelessly into her bag. Her phone was out of reach on the desk beside Jim and the window which Sissi was sitting beside gave her a delightful view of the sunny day that she was missing out on.

She pressed her forehead against the glass, relishing the smooth coolness of it. The students of Kadic Academy talked amongst themselves, the sounds of a hundred conversations mingling into a pleasant buzz, punctuated by the occasional shout or laugh.

There was Ulrich, sitting alone as usual on the opposite side of the courtyard. Della Robbia was missing from the scene, Sissi couldn't help noting smugly. Milly and Tamiya weren't too far off, though, and Sissi felt a twinge of irritation as the younger girls edged closer to Ulrich. She saw other familiar faces; Emilie LeDuc, Heidi Klinger. Julien Xao with Jérémie Belpois... that was unusual.

Sissi's gaze slid out of focus, resettling eventually on the foliage by the window. A bee hovered by the rose bushes, its tiny legs clinging tightly to a cluster of the soft pink petals. Something disturbed it and it jerked away, rising and falling gently in the air until it found its footing once more on the next flower, and Sissi couldn't help but admire the intricacy of the roses, the way the tightly curled inner petals seemed to spin... and they were spinning, slowly, the miniscule shadows cast by the overlapping petals darkening into something else, drawing Sissi deeper and deeper as the blossom itself swelled into a perfect orb with rings at its centre-

The bell rang, startling Sissi upright. In the brief moment that she looked away from the roses they had returned to normal, swaying in the light breeze as though to say, _'what?'_

She sat in silence for a moment, hands clutching the desk, attention still turned to the window. The bee had vanished.

A moment later Sissi pushed back her chair and ran from the room before Jim could say anything, grabbing her mobile on the way. Nicholas and Hervé were hovering by the library door as she left, emerging into a corridor not yet full with students returning to lessons.

"Hi Sissi."

She had barged past them without noticing, only turning at the sound of Hervé's distinct, nasally voice.

"What do you want?" she snapped. The dream in the library had unsettled her; not least because she was sure she hadn't been entirely asleep. The two boys flinched but, undeterred, made to walk alongside her.

"We hadn't spoken to you at all today," Hervé continued. "And we were wondering where you were this morning."

"None of your business! Leave me alone, both of you."

She quickened her pace and a group of older students who had turned in from a side corridor filled the gap between them, blocking Nicholas and Hervé's way. By the time the crowd had dispersed, Sissi was nowhere to be seen.

/

"Not bad, for an amateur."

Ulrich paid for this remark with a kick to the face which knocked him flat onto his back. With no time to acknowledge the wound, which would surely bruise, he rolled onto his front and pressed his palms flat against the gymnasium floor to push himself upright. He was just in time to sidestep a right jab, and he caught Yumi Ishiyama's fist in his hand. They grappled like this for a moment, Yumi struggling to free her fist and Ulrich's arms straining as he held on.

"I'm no amateur," Yumi Ishiyama snarled. "I've been training-" she paused for a beat, pulled her fist back and swung her leg around, catching Ulrich in the back of the knees and sending him toppling forward. "-Since I was little," she concluded, watching dispassionately as Ulrich landed harshly on his side, biting his lip against a cry of pain.

She stepped back, allowing him to recover his stance. He did so, climbing to his feet and moving his arm in a windmill motion, opposite hand poised on his shoulder. Shaking out the injury, he bounced energetically on the balls of his feet.

"Huh." He couldn't help grinning. This was the best match he'd had in a while. "Point taken."

"Good."

Yumi charged again but Ulrich was ready this time. He ducked swiftly and sent a punch towards her stomach, catching her off balance. Lapsing into a flawless handspring, she instantly recovered, only to spin around and counter with a punch of her own which Ulrich narrowly avoided. He breathed hard, feeling the uncomfortable trickle of sweat down his back. His hair was plastered to his forehead.

His opponent caught his eye. Her stoic expression dissolved just enough for her to offer a slight smile. Then she was on the offensive yet again.

No doubt about it; Yumi Ishiyama knew what she was doing.

Sissi stood at the window, hands scraping the rough brick of the wall, nearly invisible in the shadows outside the gym.

A stab of jealousy tore through her as she watched, reluctantly admiring the fluidity of their movements, the fast reactions and carefully timed attacks as they danced a dance of offense and defense. Who did that Ishiyama girl think she was, anyway? At last Sissi tugged her coat more tightly about her and turned from the window, preparing to make the long walk to the factory. At a leisurely pace, it would take about twenty five minutes. She would have to do some exploring and find a shortcut during the weekend.

Another time, she would have waited around for Ulrich until after his Pencat Silat practise. For now though, all Sissi really wanted to do was talk to Aelita.

_/_

It was two hours until curfew. Already it was dark outside, and cold air seeped in relentlessly throug the open window in Odd and Ulrich's dorm room.

"I don't get why you won't give her a chance," said Odd, pulling his pyjama shirt over his head with one hand and pressing buttons on a games console with the other.

Ulrich sat cross-legged on his bed, a glass of water in hand. "I told you," he replied with an air of boredom, "She's a complete airhead, and a leech as well."

"She doesn't seem too bad. A little stuck-up sure, but... eh... she did do the dare after all. At least, I'm pretty sure she did. It would explain her coming in late this morning."

"Yeah, I'm sure she did. Just to get a date with me."

"So, go on the date. Buy her a hot chocolate, listen to her ramble about her hair for half an hour, make out with her and leave."

"Why don't you go on the date if you're so keen on it. By the sounds of it you'll be a real charmer as well, if you can even get her to look twice at you."

Odd didn't acknowledge the insult. "I promised her a date with _you_ remember?"

"Yeah, well maybe you shouldn't have."

There was a scuffling sound in the corner of the room. A pile of objects fell over with a clatter and from behind them trotted a small grey dog. Both boys paused to watch it as it made its way across the room and leapt onto Ulrich's bed.

Ulrich glared at it.

"Odd. Keep your dog on your side of the room will you?"

"Okay, okay. Sorry. Here Kiwi, here boy." Kiwi's head snapped up at the sound of his owner's voice and with a small bark, he hopped off the bed, pressing his head into Odd's open palm. Odd bent to scratch the animal behind the ears.

"He's not so bad," Odd assured Ulrich. "Though, he's not used to being cooped up. In fact, he had a fit the day he got here, I just about stopped him chewing up all your stuff."

"What?!"

"Like I say, it was no big deal. I'm just saying, he's usually really well-behaved."

Just as Odd was saying this, Kiwi shifted positions once again, sniffed at one of Ulrich's discarded shirts, and began to chew on it.

"Okay, that's it." Ulrich pushed himself off his bed and stood over Odd, drawn up to his full height which admittedly wasn't much. Odd didn't look remotely phased, but Kiwi growled and proceeded to slobber over Ulrich's shoelaces. Ulrich cast his gaze down fleetingly with a look of disgust but his attention wasn't easily diverted. "If you stop pestering me, I'll go on this date with Sissi Delmas. Then both of you can finally leave me alone. And, on one other condition: You make sure this mutt never goes anywhere near my stuff again. Got it?"

"Sure," said Odd. "Though, with us being room mates and all, it's going to be hard to avoid each other."

"I don't care, just make sure you do."

They lapsed into silence for a while. Odd scooped Kiwi up into his lap and scratched him once more behind the ears. He glanced over at his discarded video game, but didn't pick it up.

"So Sissi's not your type," Odd said eventually. Ulrich sighed and drained the rest of his glass of water. Why did he get stuck with the roommate who was constantly compelled to talk? "You like the girl in year above us, right? The Chinese girl?"

"She's Japanese. And that's nothing to do with you, it's not like we're not best friends or anything remember."

"All right, but I know how to act when it comes to the ladies. So if you ever need any advice-"

"No thanks, Della Robbia."

Odd looked slightly put out. "Okay, okay. The offer's always there."

/

It was almost automatic this time. Sissi's steps down the unbroken stairs at the entrance of the factory were slightly less hesitant, and she didn't allow herself to pause as she crossed the moonlit floor to the elevator. One floor down, she found the supercomputer and the chair and, most importantly, Aelita, waiting there for her just how she had left them.

"Hi Aelita," Sissi greeted her wearily as she dropped her bag at her side and sat down.

"Sissi!" Aelita seemed pleased to see her at least, her face lighting up as Sissi came into view on her interface. "I was worried about you."

"You were?"

Aelita nodded. "After your shutting down last night, then running off this morning, I-"

"Shutting down?"

It became obvious fairly quickly that Aelita needed many basic concepts explaining to her, something that Sissi took a strange delight in for how intelligent it made her feel and how impressed Aelita was at every new piece of knowledge. The first of these many basic concepts, it seemed, was sleeping.

"I've never had to explain sleep to anyone before. Uh, it's basically when you get tired and run out of energy. Like when your batteries run out. I guess that must have looked a little weird to you when I drifted off like that. So... you don't sleep or eat or anything, do you?"

Aelita shook her head.

"What have you been doing this whole time, then?"

"I've been trying to find out more about Lyoko."

"Oh." Sissi tried not to look too bored. "Well, I had a _terrible_ day. I got detention for being just a little bit late and I didn't have time for breakfast, and even though I'd won the bet Ulrich didn't even really seem to care. He doesn't even like Odd Della Robbia – I think I've told you about him – but he keeps following him around, and he's so _annoying_ with his stupid girly-looking long hair and bad jokes. Then there's Hervé and Nicholas who keep following _me_ around, and-"

When Sissi had sufficiently rambled about her day she heaved and a sigh, shoulders slumped.

"And that was my whole day. So, uh, what did you find out about Lyoko?"

"Well," Aelita began. "It seems like there are a lot of things I can't access, but I found some really interesting programmes."

Sissi nodded obligingly, resisting the urge to fidget. All of this technical talk was alien to her. Words like "materialisation", "virtualisation", "processing power" and "transfers" went straight over her head, gaze drifting about the room though she tried to be attentive. Eventually Aelita concluded, "I'd like to find out even more about Lyoko, if you don't mind. I wanted you to be here whilst I went exploring for the first time."

"Have you found a way to get out of the room you're in?" Sissi's eyes snapped back to the screen.

"Possibly. It seems to be a tower, a sort of holding centre for data, and it responds to physical touch. Here." Aelita stood up, walking cautiously across one of the narrow branches on the floor. As she touched the wall a strange thing happened; it yielded beneath her fingers and began to draw her in; Aelita experienced a terrifying moment of complete blankess and then-

Two things happened. Firstly, the hologram in the supercomputer room came to life, and secondly, Aelita found herself outside.

"Wow," she breathed. Sissi leaned into the computer, wide-eyed as she scanned the space where Aelita had just been.

"What is it?" she pressed. "Aelita, are you there? Something's happened on this side, too."

"I'm here, Sissi. What's happened?"

"A sort of holographic sphere just lit up. It's like..." she swivelled in the chair and walked over to study it more closely. "There are branches coming off it, four of them. Different sections." She reached out to touch them, but her fingers went straight through the miniscule details; trees, ridges, icecaps, plains. "Forest, mountain, ice, desert..." she mumbled.

"Sissi? I think I may be able to send you a visual." Sissi returned to the computer and sure enough, a second later a window appeared on the screen. It was Lyoko, through Aelita's eyes, and Sissi gasped at the sheer magnitude of it.

It was a forest like something out of a fairytale, with trees so tall you had no hope of seeing the tops. Somewhere up ahead was a small lake with tree stumps as stepping stones. The grass beneath Aelita's feet looked almost real. Sissi forgot momentarily that what she was seeing was a virtual world, but when she realised it once more the revelation was even more impressive.

"It's wonderful."

"Yes," Aelita agreed. "I'm going to walk around a little."

She did so, and Sissi watched through Aelita's eyes as the world unfolded before them. It was quiet, devoid of any life at all, and they struck up conversation as Aelita went.

"You seem troubled today, Sissi," said Aelita as she hopped over a stepping stone.

"Hmm."

"I wish there was something I could do to help you."

"It's okay. Thanks, though."

"Are you sure you wouldn't like to talk more about it?"

Sissi considered this for a moment. What was it she had heard once? 'Most of the stuff you delete from a computer is never really deleted; much of it can still be recovered.' How much of herself, all her thoughts about Ulrich and the million other things, did she want to divulge to this artificially intelligent girl? Aelita, along with the supercomputer itself, would become the vessel of all of her secrets. Not to mention that becoming _friends_ with a computer programme was still a bit too weird.

"Nothing," Sissi said. "It's nothing at all."

Aelita walked on, taking care not to stray too close to the edge of the platform. They both agreed that the blank space beneath the forest didn't look very promising without some way to explore it safely.

"There must be a way to travel between the different sectors," Aelita was saying. "Like some kind of transportation system or something."

"Hmm, I guess so."

"I think we should see if there are any more towers. That way, I might be able to access more-" she gasped, and Sissi felt a wave of dizziness as the visual shook, Aelita stumbling backwards.

"Aelita, what's wrong?"

Even before the question had fully left her mouth, the lasers began to fire. Aelita didn't hestitate; the screen spun rapidly around and Sissi, hands over her mouth, saw the ground rise and fall in bumpy motions as Aelita began to run. Behind her was the creaking of dozens of mechanical footsteps.

It was the first indication that not all was well with Lyoko.


	3. Einstein

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sissi's cheerleading chant comes directly from the prequel episodes, "XANA Awakens, Parts 1 & 2".

Monsters.

There was no other way to describe the creatures that scuttled after Aelita. A bizarre mixture of bug and machine, thin mechanical legs supporting their blotchy, eyeless, misshapen bodies. They were small but their size was compensated for in numbers and there were at least a dozen swarming, with yet more emerging over fallen tree logs and grassy ridges. From gaping red mouths they fired their lasers, marring the ground at Aelita's feet.

Sissi absorbed all of this in indistinct blurs as Aelita looked back – once, twice, until Sissi, face practically pressed against the screen, yelled at her.

"Don't stop! _Run_!"

Aelita's breath came in hurried gasps, laced with desperate whimpers which made Sissi think of someone drowning. She felt dizzy as the screen moved with Aelita, the elf-girl leaping over flat planes and skidding slightly, uncertain, as she reached the small lake. She closed her eyes and took the first leap, landing shakily on a log-turned-stepping-stone, and with Sissi's encouragement she made the next, and the next, wobbling each time a laser sounded too close to her ear.

"Not too far," Sissi encouraged, fighting to keep her voice level. "Keep going, Aelita; just get to the tower."

"R-right," Aelita fought out between gasps. There were but a few metres of ground left to cover now, but Aelita could see the monsters out of the corner of her eyes, closing in greedily left and right. Just as Aelita was thinking how miraculous it was that she had avoided being hit, she felt something pierce her thigh – she anticipated pain and felt only an vague approximation of it. The real danger was in the way the shot threw off her balance and Aelita held out her hands instinctively in front of her as she was pushed forward, through the gnarled wall of the tower.

All sound vanished as though sucked into a vaccum. The whirring click and creak that marked the monster's movements, Sissi's breathing, the echo of her own footsteps, all lost in a ethereal blue serenity.

It took her a moment to realise she was falling.

Sissi's voice returned then, close and desperate in Aelita's ear – on Earth it echoed and bounced from the cold factory walls.

She couldn't respond, and instead spun in mid-air to see the white platform of the tower passing by her. Aelita had misaimed her entry into the tower and now she was careening into the gaping, unknown darkness that swallowed up the cylindrical structure.

 _This is it,_ she thought. _Sissi, goodbye-_

The thoughts had grazed the surface of her disorientated and fevered mind for no more than a moment and then it was over, and Aelita was still in existence.

"Aelita," came Sissi's disembodied voice. "Aelita are you there? You fell through the bottom of the tower, I don't know-"

"I'm here, Sissi. This is very strange, but I've ended up exactly where I left off."

It was true; she landed gently, as though lowered by invisible hands, on a mirror of the platform she had fallen past. There was no difference at all in this new place. The walls – if they could be called that – were threaded through with electric-blue binary code, and the surface beneath her feet, the same white ringed with blue, was reassuringly solid.

Sissi was less intrigued by this and more concerned with everything that had just occured.

"Did you _see_ those things?" she exclaimed. "I wish we'd been able to have a proper look at them. They were so creepy. Like mutant robot potatoes. With lasers."

"Potatoes?"

"Never mind."

There was the slightest of pauses, and Sissi heaved a long, relieved sigh. "I was worried for a minute there."

"Me too," Aelita admitted. "At least we know nothing bad happens if you drop off the edge of one of these platforms. Do you think I should risk going back outside?"

"I don't know. Those monster thingies might still be there."

"Maybe not." Aelita paced back and forth, considering. "I have a feeling about something..."

"Aelita-"

Sissi trailed off, waiting anxiously as Aelita stepped out of the tower. Her eyes were glued to the visual onscreen as Aelita dissolved through the wall.

They gasped as one.

The forest had vanished. All around her, there was ice.

/

That evening and all of the next day, the newly discovered Ice sector was all Sissi could think about. She had had to leave soon after their adventure, and she made Aelita promise to stay put until she could return to the factory as she wanted them to explore this new realm together. Sissi had been so distracted, and rather more tired than she wanted to admit, that she barely even noticed when Mrs Hertz paired her with Ulrich for their next long-term project. When she was called out twice for not paying attention in class, she remained too deeply entrenched in her own thoughts to care.

Sometimes Sissi would venture to the principal's office as a misbehaving student. Sometimes, as Jean-Pierre's daughter.

Unsurprisingly – to Sissi anyway, who was used to this – the two weren't really all that different.

As the receptionist nodded for her to go in and Sissi knocked on the heavy oak-panelled door, waiting for the sound of the deep, weary voice telling her to enter, she wondered if it was normal to live in the same building as your father and yet see him almost as infrequently as kids boarding from halfway across the country saw their own parents.

On cue she opened the door and stepped slowly over the plush carpeted floor of the office, hands dangling at her sides.

"Hello, Daddy," she said meekly.

"Elisabéth," he replied. "Take a seat."

She wasn't put off by the use of her full name, nor the lack of endearments in his speech. She had this down to a fine art, and knew just how it would go – exactly the way it always did. Settling into the role, she perched on the edge of a hard-backed chair and fixed her father with her most contrite-looking smile. It was dark in the room, the only light being the square that shone in from the window behind the desk, and a panel had been removed from the ceiling to display the wire guts of broken circuits. Delmas glanced up at this anxiously for a moment, then turned his full attention towards his daughter.

"Daddy, I-"

He held up a hand to stop her. "Elisabéth dear" - ( _there_ , she thought, _he's softening already_ ) – "what's the matter?"

"I... nothing, Daddy."

"We're three days into the school term. You've missed a class already, and the ones you do attend, you're not paying attention." He pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses, and she realised with a pang that he looked exhausted, emphasised by the addition of new lines to his weathered face. She didn't know what to say so she waited.

"Sissi, I thought you were going to try harder this year. This isn't a good start."

Something coursed through her that replaced her usual righteous indignation when it came to reprimands. When she stared down at her hands, now folded in her lap, the expression of regret on her face was genuine.

"I know I haven't been able to see very much of you since we got back," Delmas said, "and I apologise. But-" here he shifted for a moment into the stern principal mode that Sissi saw so often when he addressed the other students "-that is no excuse for this behaviour. Do I make myself clear?"

The apology didn't make it okay, but it helped. In return she offered up one of her own, feeling for a brief moment as though she was partaking in an obligatory exchanging of Christmas gifts.

"Yes," she said. "I'm sorry, Daddy."

He nodded and it was as easy as that. Knowing that she was no longer in trouble, Sissi smiled brightly at him. Her thoughts were already drawn once more to Aelita and the supercomputer, and what they were going to do about the monsters in the Forest sector. Much more important than art and French literature.

"I'm going to get back to class now, Daddy."

Smiling back at her, he pulled a sheet of paperwork and a pen towards him. "Have a good day, Sissi."

Later, after a hastily-eaten dinner, Sissi set off at a brisk pace for the factory. It was getting dark more quickly now as autumn approached and the weather was unpredictable, swift to turn from mild to cold. Even if there hadn't been the ice sector to explore, she mused as she glanced both ways, as much to check she wouldn't be spotted by fellow students as to check for upcoming traffic, she would still go, day in day out, just to talk to Aelita.

It was beginning to feel as though she had known her forever. Was this what having a best friend felt like? Or was it only friendship if you knew for sure the other person actually liked you?

Sissi was wrestling with this thought when she settled into the computer chair and offered Aelita a hestitant wave. The other girl returned it enthusiastically from the screen. Aelita was practically vibrating with barely-suppressed excitement.

"Aren't you afraid?" Sissi asked her, after they exchanged pleasantries and Aelita stepped out into the icy realm **,** a world decked in white and frosty blue. There was a certain energy in the air – everything about this particular visit to the factory felt directed and focused, preparation for a mission.

Aelita shrugged. "A little. I can always go back to the tower, and you're here. It'll be okay."

She began to walk, following a narrow path surrounded on both sides by vast stretches of water. Sometime during this, Sissi accidentally pulled up a map of Aelita's immediate location; it was an encouraging breakthrough, and, pleased to be of help, she pointed out upcoming details to Aelita.

"It looks like the path widens out again, and you have another small island coming up. There's something further up north and.. I think it might be another tower! There's lots of caves and icebergs here, so if any monsters come it'll be easy to hide." A minute later she started at the appearance of a new feature on the map. A cluster of blinking red dots. She barely even had to check to know what they were.

"They're coming."

Sissi found herself whispering, the words pushed out past quickened breaths, her muscles stiff with tension as she leaned close to the screen. The harsh glow of it hurt her eyes, but she was too wound up to lean back in the chair now, unable to miss a second of what was about to unfold.

"Can you see them on the map?" There was a tremor in Aelita's voice, which Sissi could hear as clearly as though she were standing right beside her. She broke into a light sprint, diving gratefully behind a nearby boulder of ice. This sector was as indeed as expansive as the Forest but, thankfully, more suitably equipped with places to hide.

"Yeah. There's three of them, but they're quite far off. You still have time."

Sissi saw the virtual ice beneath Aelita's feet jerk as she nodded. "Okay," Aelita said. "If I can sneak around them, I might just be able to make it."

"Are you going to check out the other tower?"

"I can't go back now."

"Be careful, Aelita."

She watched at once through Aelita's eyes and on the map as the virtual girl pressed her back to the ice boulder and side-stepped along it. She forced herself to keep calm, peering around the edge of her makeshift shelter to assess the scene properly.

There were different monsters this time, scattered amongst the first type they had seen; cube-shaped entities, two of them, carried on those same spindly legs. A pearly orb was set into each of their four-sided faces and on it a motif of branches and concentric circles. There were five or six of the other, smaller monsters, and these scuttled to and fro as though impatient.

Aelita studied them for a long moment, trying to not to make herself too obvious as she peered out from the behind the icy rock. To the far right, the terrain veered off into a blue tunnel – above it, up ahead, she could see another tower just like the two she had occupied. As though reading her mind, Sissi's voice in her ear informed her that that was the safest route. She nodded, resolute. She would put her faith in Sissi.

Eyes squeezed shut, Aelita counted backwards from three...

_Two... one... now!_

She leapt out into the open space between herself and the monsters, ducked and rolled past the inevitable barrage of laser-fire. For a few seconds she was sure she wouldn't make it, until she heard the sounds of laser boring into rock, looked down to find her own body unscathed beneath the cover of a shadowy tunnel.

There was no time to celebrate this small victory, as she heard the sounds of monsters approaching, seeking her out. She took off at a sprint through the passage, forcing herself to keep going as the incline grew steeper; when she looked back they were gathered at the mouth of the tunnel, fighting to navigate the overly-smooth surface. Aelita herself stumbled and slid, afraid to lose her footing and fall helplessly back down into the sea of monsters below, but her hands clasped stalagtites and stalagmites and towards the end she heaved herself up like a mountain climber nearing the summit. Finally she groped with desperate fingertips to the top of a ledge, swinging herself up at last onto blessedly flat ground.

She was hit.

It caught her in the back and she cried out – Sissi echoed the sound – and Aelita instinctively rolled away, pressing the palms of her hands to the ground and pushing herself into a crouch. The shot hadn't come from behind her, where the monsters were struggling, but from _above_ her prone form, splayed on the precipice. She raised her head, feeling as though it was all happening so agonisingly slowly. Before her was another of the cube-like monsters, or perhaps one of the same which had abandoned its allies and found another route. Its body spun on its legs, and Aelita just managed to avoid the new attack it presented – a white beam, different from the red, which shattered like an icicle on the ground she had just occupied.

The tower wasn't far away, raised on an icy pillar, taunting. The monster stood between it and Aelita and she ran in a wide curve away from it, hopping and ducking and moving between rocks, distancing herself from the monster but also, with the angle at which she was running, from the tower.

Another laser struck her in the stomach, flinging her onto her back; thankfully it was a red laser, because she had no idea what the white one did and didn't want to find out. Struggling to sit up as she trembled from the force of the impact, Aelita watched the monster turn in her direction.

A thought came to her out of nowhere, as though it wasn't her own thought at all, but instead as though someone had taken the idea and placed it gently inside of her own mind. Against all reason it made perfect sense to her.

Aelita knew what to do.

She struggled to her knees, bent her head and clasped her smooth palms together. She felt the ground beneath her and heard a sound, a high-pitched, almost angelic melody, that thrummed in harmony with the virtual world; she realised gradually that the sound was her own voice, singing to the land, at once praising it and asking it for help.

The ground began to shake but Aelita stayed where she was, hands clasped, knees slightly part, still singing. She dared not look until it was over, but the sight she opened her eyes to was something she could hardly believe she had invoked herself – the surface on which the monster stood had split entirely apart. The monster's legs flailed, the edges of its awkward body scraping the sides of the ice as it felt, down, down, down, and vanished into the nothingness that lay beneath Lyoko.

Aelita knew then that anything which fell into that place would not come back.

She stared after it for a long time. The shock of what had transpired made her movements slow, her mind struggling to catch up and process all that had just happened. It was with a lethargic, numb sort of auto-pilot that she covered the last of the distance to the tower, which she entered, embracing the blissful quiet. Already she felt energised as the soothing tranquillity of pure data restored her lost life points.

"Thank goodness," Sissi breathed, bursting into stilted, relieved laughter. "Wow."

Aelita shrugged off the victory. Instead she crossed to the centre of the tower, staring around at the same old scenery, the same old strands of data.

"It's all the same," she said, finding Sissi's face on the screen in the middle of the platform, just as she had done before. "None of these towers are any different. Sissi, what's going on?"

"I don't know-"

"I was so sure we'd find something different, somewhere. What if this is all there is? Just towers, and more towers, and monsters."

Sissi felt uncomfortable as the adrenaline of the chase began to ebb away. She hadn't really thought about what to expect when they found this tower but she had to agree that finding more of the same was discouraging. However, she had nothing to say, no hopeful reassurance that could cheer up Aelita.

"You managed to get there," she offered instead by way of consolation. "Anyway, what _was_ that? The thing where you made the ice just fall away like that, it was amazing!"

"I don't really know," Aelita admitted. "I just felt really calm all of a sudden, and then I _knew_. I knew what exactly what I had to do, and how to do it."

"At least now you have some way to defend yourself. Uh, Aelita... what are we looking for exactly?"

"Answers," she replied without hesitation. "Other humanoid lifeforms. Perhaps a way to escape Lyoko, if there is one."

The way she said 'escape' made Sissi shudder. It put the virtual world she had found into an even more sinister light and the truth of it resonated with her.

"Okay," she said. "Don't go again without me, okay? I can use the map. It'll be safer with me here."

"I won't, Sissi," Aelita promised. Sensing their evening together drawing to an end she said, "Will I see you tomorrow?"

"Sure. It's cheerleading tryouts too. Wish me luck?"

"Good luck," Aelita replied absently, sat cross-legged with her hands on her chin. She was distant, radiating disappointment and frustration. Sissi felt irrationally angry, but it was only with herself for being so useless. Swinging herself down from the seat, she gathered her things.

"See you later Aelita."

/

There were no tryouts.

This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it was simply the consequence of so few people turning up that the handful of would-be auditioness, just enough to make up a team, automatically formed the squad. The plan was to practise some school spirit chants which could be played at school soccer games and swimming meets. For Sissi, it was a way to keep fit, improve her flexibility for Pencat Silat and cheer on Ulrich in his sports endeavours whilst looking her best. It was the only thing she had been excited for, school-wise, since term began.

She stood on the damp grass in her brand new skirt, shirt and white pumps, twirling her baton in her hands. She looked the other girls up and down and didn't think too much of them, but then, she hadn't spoken to many of them before. They had all made friends during their first year and Sissi, intent on chasing Ulrich, had been left in the dust long before she realised it was too late.

"Is this all of you?" Jim Moralés bellowed, quite accidentally, through his megaphone as he approached them across the field. The girls cast questioning glances at each other before generally nodding and murmuring confirmation. Jim looked disappointed.

"Poor turnout. Though maybe it's not such a bad thing," he said. "I should mention right now, uh, after-school sports are cancelled next week, anyway, since I'm the only fix-it guy around here and this whole school is on the blink. Those new light fittings put in over the summer, I'll bet. Short-circuits everywhere. Knew those guys weren't sure what they were doing. In fact, it reminds me of the time I worked as a maintenance man for-"

The cheerleaders erupted in a chorus of groans. "No one wants to hear about it, Jim!"

He looked put out but didn't comment, just cleared his throat and continued. "Well, all right then, ladies. Let's see what you've got."

When it was Sissi's turn to step up and perform her chant, she forced down her nerves and put on her best, most confident smile. Her baton gripped firmly in hand, she repeated the steps she had practised diligently in front of her bedroom mirror, and tried to ignore how completely unimpressed Jim and the other girls looked. To her irritation, Hervé and Nicholas had turned up to watch and stood now at the back of the group, waving, yelling, and generally being a distraction.

She tuned them out and focused on her performance.

"A cheerleader cheers so her team won't lose! We've got short skirts and sparkly shoes! We're just so gorgeous how can you choose? There's no doubt we've got clout, winning at Kadic is what it's all about! Kaaaaaadic!"

It was all going well until she lost control of the baton. Instead of spinning it gracefully in her hands as planned, it spun wildly high up into the air... and landed painfully on Jim's head. The crowd burst into laughter whilst Jim rubbed his head and shot her a look of complete exasperation.

He handed the baton back to her and shook his head, saying something that she didn't hear. Her attention was diverted elsewhere by a familiar voice laughing along with the rest, and she turned towards the source at the top of the bleachers.

She dropped the baton, uncaring of where it fell, and strode up to where Odd Della Robbia and Ulrich Stern had just arrived and taken seats. Every time Ulrich would try to shuffle a little further away, Odd would notice and mirror the movement so that they were still sitting side by side. Odd attempted something like a joke but Ulrich remained stony-faced and unimpressed. Now however, Odd had turned his attentions to the efforts of the newly-formed cheer squad.

"Is something funny?" Sissi demanded when she reached them, crossing her arms over her chest as she tossed her hair over her shoulder.

"Of course not, Delmas." Odd raised an eyebrow at her, the fading laughter still playing about his lips. "I was just admiring your excellent aim, there."

"I'd like to see you do better."

"No thanks. I'm much happier _not_ looking like an idiot."

Sissi smirked, looking him up and down and especially making sure to scrutinise his hair, which still fell in strands over his shoulders. "Really? You're not doing a great job."

Odd actually flinched a little but he recovered quickly, a glint in his eye now.

"Yeah, I forgot I was the biggest loser here. Oh wait, no." He cleared his throat and in a high-pitched, nasty imitation of Sissi's voice, he recited; "A cheerleader cheers so her team won't lose! We've got short skirts and sparkly shoes-"

He carried on to the end, miming exaggerated dance moves. Sissi stood, aware that everyone in the crowd below was watching. Jim had disappeared to get an ice-pack for the bruise now forming on his head; this scene was unsupervised, and all insults were fair game. Sissi struggled with the embarrassment, unable to shut Odd up – every time she spoke, he just recited louder.

Ulrich sat to the side, faintly amused, saying nothing at all.

"Kaaaaadic!" He mimed the dramatic flinging of the baton, and finished with a bow. "Hey, don't I get a round of applause for that great performance?"

Obligingly, the group below cheered, all except Nicholas and Hervé who glared up at him with their fists bunched at their sides.

Sissi said nothing. She had worked _hard_ on that routine, was quite pleased with the chant. She had meant to run it by Aelita but with one thing and another had forgotten. She regretted that now; if she had done so, she would have known sooner that it was stupid.

Sissi's lack of response, combined with the mencing looks Hervé and Nicholas were throwing his way, meant that Odd took his cue to leave and rapidly changed the subject.

"Oh hey, Noemie!" he spotted another cheerleader, one arm waving madly as he vaulted over the seats towards her. "Yoo hoo, Noemie!"

Noemie, previously enjoying the spectacle, now looked anything but pleased at the attention. Glaring at her friends who were grinning smug, unhelpful grins, she made to escape before Odd caught up to her.

Sissi watched them go, wondering briefly what had transpired between the two of them and still berating herself for her performance, before realising that she was alone with Ulrich. He still hadn't said anything. She spun around so she was facing him, a thrill running through her as their knees touched. Sissi had missed him, had spoken to no one but Aelita for the last day or so, and as she took in the sharp, handsome angles of his face she blushed beneath her make-up.

"Guess you still can't get rid of that Odd, huh," she said conversationally. "Can I help you with something, Ulrich dear?"

"I was only looking for Jim." He turned from her as he spoke and drew his knees up, swinging them out to the opposite side to rest on the back of the seats in front. "I suppose we should decide what we're going to do for Hertz's project."

"Oh!" Sissi's hands flew to her mouth. "I almost forgot! It'll be great. We can spend so much more time together."

"I was just getting used to not seeing you around."

She leaned into him, fluttered her eyelashes. "Don't be silly, Ulrich. This could be great fun. If we spent enough time together-"

"-On the project-"

"-Yeah yeah, anyway, we might even get a good grade. Besides you still owe me that date."

He deliberately lifted his weight and slid across the bench, out of reach. "No thanks."

"Aw come on. We'll go and have lunch, and we can work on the assignment at the same time. It'll be fun."

"I don't think our definitions of 'fun' quite match up," Ulrich said coldly. "We'll do all the work in class."

He stood up and walked away.

Sissi left too, in the opposite direction, her pace fuelled by angry indigation, shame, and the tears that threatened to overspill.

/

"I just don't get it."

Sissi had uttered this phrase, and several equivalents, dozens of times over the past few days, and each further affirmation of her own inability to understand drove her further and further to frustration.

It had been two weeks.

Two weeks of sneaking out as often as she could, of almost getting caught during dorm spot-checks, of late-night talks with Aelita that left Sissi pleasantly exhausted the next day and less lonely than she had felt for some time. With the school year now underway, progress surrounding Lyoko grew staggered and halting, marked by the days she could and could not visit the factory and the amount of time she could spend there. If only there was a way to talk to Aelita from any other computer, but Sissi hadn't the know-how to figure that one out. Aelita reassured her kindly that there was no rush, and then proceeded to spend days lying on the floor of a tower, combing through data or else staring listlessly at the ceiling.

Sissi would be lying, much as she missed Aelita, if she denied stepping out of that elevator onto the second floor without a hint of trepidation, anticipating another night of going around in circles with Aelita feverishly researching and compiling data which Sissi then rifled through with growing confusion and despair.

Now, she ran one hand exasperatedly down her face and sifted through the piles of paper littering the keyboard. In the tower, Aelita rested her hand on her chin and sighed.

"We've made progress, though," Aelita pointed out. After the initial exploration mission to the Ice sector she had developed an optimistic outlook which, to Sissi, appeared slightly forced.

"I guess. But... I feel so _stupid._ I can barely pass my science classes, how am I supposed to understand all of this gibberish?"

The dark-haired girl scrolled through one of several windows she had brought up on the screen for the hundreth time, lines and lines of incomprehensible text, programmes she would never be able to run. This one file in particular bothered her. The name of the programme was unsettling, and she read it aloud again.

 _"_ Like, _return to the past -_ what does that even mean?" she mused. "As though a computer could actually make someone go back in time."

"You never know," replied Aelita, though she too looked doubtful. "After all, you said when we first met that artificial intelligences and virtual worlds are the stuff of science fiction, and yet... here I am."

"Even so, I don't have a clue how to actually make it work."

"Well, let's review what we've got so far."

Sissi nodded, and counted off their recent discoveries on her fingers.

"Okay, so we know that the towers can make you travel to different parts of Lyoko, we've explored some of the Forest, the Ice sector and the Desert. We know that there are lots of towers, and monsters, and that the space around Lyoko is definitely dangerous... that's not much."

"Also, that I have life points," Aelita added, "that can be regenerated through a period of staying put in a tower."

"But we don't know what happens when those life points run out."

Worry flitted over Aelita's face at this stark reminder of potential death. Death was the word Sissi had used and the concept was something Aelita didn't have a clear grasp of, but the idea of returning to the nothingness that had preceded her awakening (and the thing that bothered her most immensely when Sissi left and she was alone with her thoughts, was _what did come before?_ ) was quietly terrifying.

Sissi shifted position to sit cross-legged on the chair, oblivious to Aelita's inner turmoil. If not for the life points part, she might be forgiven for thinking less and less of Lyoko as a video game and more a part of something much greater.

It made her head hurt to think about it.

"Can we be done for today?" Sissi pleaded. "Only," here she glanced at her mobile for the time, and frowned, "I don't have much time left before curfew, and I'll need to finish this homework when I get back." Another growing concern that she hadn't voiced was that Ulrich had been avoiding her and their project for Mrs Hertz was suffering because of it, but she pushed this one to the back of her mind for now.

"Homework?"

"Stupid extra work they give you after class. Except, I don't even understand what goes on _in_ class, so how I'm supposed to do this is anyone's guess."

She avoided looking at Aelita as she said this; it was embarrassing to admit a flaw like this to someone – something – so intelligent.

Aelita however, simply smiled encouragingly and said, "Let's see."

Reluctantly, Sissi positioned the sheet of algebra equations in front of the screen. Aelita tilted her head thoughtfully to the side as she studied the pre-prepared examples. Sissi watched with envious fascination as Aelita concentrated, working out the pattern and method, and wished she was as smart as a computer.

"Okay, I think I've got it. It looks like you have to move all the symbols to one side, and the numbers to the other and the change the function as necessary."

"That sounds about right. I think." Sissi nodded slowly, recalling what little of Ms Meyer's lecture had seeped into her brain.

"Let's give it a shot, shall we."

With Aelita's help, Sissi worked through the equations more quickly than she had ever done so in her life, and by the time she filled in the last answer, she was in a much better mood.

"Hey, that wasn't so bad! I had no idea maths could be that easy. Oh, thanks Aelita," she added, and the other girl smiled, hunching her shoulders modestly.

"I'm happy to help. It's just a case of applying the method. Maybe I'd be good at maths if I was at your school."

Sissi's face lit up at the thought. "Wouldn't that be great? We could sit by each other in class, and I'd show you all the best places to shop in town, and we could hang out in my dorm and watch movies. I think you'd really like Earth, Aelita. There's so much to do, even if there's boring things like school and chores sometimes."

"It sounds really interesting," Aelita agreed.

"And we could go to concerts," Sissi continued emphatically, now thoroughly enchanted with the idea. "We could go and see the Subsonics, I've always wanted to, and meet Chris backstage. The Subsonics are one of my favourite bands," she added hastily in explanation," and Chris is the lead singer." She drew a crumpled magazine from her bag, opening it to an interview splashed over two pages. "See?" she said, pointing. "The cute one with the white hair. He's awesome."

"Hmm," said Aelita approvingly.

Sissi laughed, Aelita soon joining in.

This was all she had wanted, really.

Later that night, Sissi dreamed dreams threaded through with the colour pink, about small hands reaching out to her through soft white mist. In her dreams, too, she heard a sound like a video tape being rewound backwards, and she awoke feeling strange though she did not remember why.

In a moment of inspiration the next time was at the factory, she copied some data onto a disc which she clutched to her chest on the walk back home, nuturing it as the seed of a growing idea.

/

"I need your help."

Hervé Pichon blinked sceptically behind his glasses. He looked over his shoulder to see who Sissi Delmas was talking to, then turned back to see her unmoving, imposing with her hands on her hips as she stood over his desk. The classroom was otherwise empty. She scowled at him.

"Me?" he asked meekly.

She rolled her eyes. "Yes you, you dork. You're smart, right?"

"Oh!" said Hervé, realisation dawning. "You, uh, want me to do your homework or something?"

She considered this, mentally filed it away as a future possibility, then shook her head. "No, actually. It's... something else. A kind of project."

Hervé's flushed slighty pink. He brushed lanky black hair from his spotty forehead and tried to look casual as he leaned back in his chair though all the while his hands were clammy.

"You're tired of partnering with Stern and you want to do the assignment with me?"

He barely believed it, so wasn't surprised when Sissi threw back her head and laughed.

" _No!_ Don't be stupid. Besides, it's not that project. It's a personal thing I'm working on."

Between shrugging off the embarrassment and revelling in the fact that this was the longest conversation with Sissi Delmas that he'd ever had in his life, Hervé just about remembered to be curious. He leaned forward again, narrow shoulders hunched and hands clasped in front of him. Sissi seemed to be refusing to sit down but she did nudge his books away to lean slightly on the desk, more out of comfort than anything else.

"What's it about, this project? And what do you need me for?"

"Never mind that. First, I need to know that you'll keep your mouth shut."

"What's in it for me?"

Sissi forced herself to smile, or at least stop scowling. Intimidation could only get one so far; now it was time to turn on the charm. "You get to hang out with me."

"What, like-"

"Like friends," she interjected quickly. She shuddered at the thought of _dating_ this guy, eyeing a particularly nasty cluster of spots peppering his chin. It wasn't just his appearance though. Something about him rubbed her the wrong way.

"Huh." His mouth twisted in disappointment. "Well, all right."

"And you're not going to tell anyone. Anyone at all, got it?"

"What about Nicolas?"

He gestured to his right and and she realised the classroom wasn't empty after all – slouched in a desk in the corner was that ginger-haired kid, Nicolas, whose last name Sissi couldn't remember. Pol-something. He cracked open an eyelid and observed them briefly before returning to his own world, encased in a bubble of music blaring from the headphones in his ears.

"Nic won't say anything," Hervé pressed. "He's cool."

Sissi snorted.

Hervé noticed and added, "I mean, he's just... Nicolas. He won't say anything. He won't even care."

"He'd better not."

"He won't."

"Good."

Satisfied, Sissi dragged a chair towards her and finally sat down as she pulled a few sheets of folded paper from her jacket pocket. She made to open them then paused, surveying the room around them.

"You're studying on a Friday afternoon?"

Hervé flushed indignantly. "I just want to get all my homework out of the way, that's all." He moved to cover the book he was reading and Sissi just about glimpsed the title, something to do with construction or robots, before it was swept out of sight. Robots these days made her think of Lyoko – in fact, everything these days seemed to remind her of it, as though the virtual world had seeped not only into her thoughts and daydreams but into the very fabric of life at Kadic itself.

She shrugged off the thought and finally unfolded the papers as Hervé watched with interest. He reached out eagerly as she passed them to him and his eyes scanned pages and pages of tiny typescript. Sometimes he flicked back a page to read something again more closely, nose bent close to the paper. It took a long time. He could feel her scrutinising him and wished Nicholas would say something, but at the first sign of textbooks his friend would zone out, waiting here for Hervé for as long as necessary. At last he looked up, made bold by curiousity and disbelief, and said,

"What the heck is this?"

It was Sissi's turn to look uncomfortable. She wound her hands in the hem of her shirt as she spoke. "I was hoping you'd be able to tell me. It's a print-out of the script for a computer programme."

"I can see that, but..."

"But what?"

"It's total garbage." He gave a nasally snort of laughter. "It's like an entire theoretical physics textbook compressed onto a couple of pages. No, not theoretical physics – _science fiction_."

Sissi was getting rather tired of those words. This was reality. _Her_ reality. Aelita's reality.

"So if you put this into a su- into a computer, it wouldn't work?"

Hervé adjusted his glasses and contemplated it for a second. This was very, very strange. Sissi couldn't have written this herself, could she? Of course not. She was beautiful and amazing, but, he had to admit, not too clever. Besides, she barely understood it herself, otherwise she wouldn't be talking to him. Where had she found it? Was there more stuff like it?

"...Hervé- hey!"

His head snapped up, inner monologue broken off. Sissi had called his name more than a few times.

"Sorry," he said. "I was thinking about it."

"Well?" she pressed, leaning forward with her hands on her knees, dark eyes intense and expression... hungry. Desperate. "Would this work or not?"

"Uh. I don't really know..." he winced, hating to disappoint and fearful of her anger. "There are gaps, so it kind of looks like you have to enter key instructions on the programme yourself to run it, but I've no idea how it would even work. You'd need to be like, Einstein or something, to know that."

"Who's Einstein?"

Hervé blinked, then shook his head. "Anyway, this is pointless. Like I say, it's rubbish. You'd need about a hundred computers, probably more, to have enough processing power to carry out something like this. And even then, it's... Sissi, do you know what this does?"

She didn't meet his eyes.

He leaned forward. His heart was racing for nothing to do with being so close to Sissi Delmas, and the classroom felt suddenly cold. They had been here for hours without even realising, and through the window the colours of the sky had gradually changed in anticipation of the sunset. "Sissi, it's a programme for reversing time _._ "

She scraped back her chair so harshly that it clattered to the floor behind her. Sissi took advantage of the moment, and Hervé flinching at the sound, to tear the papers from his hand. His fingers scrabbled desperately after them but to no avail.

"Yeah, whatever. Thanks for nothing. And remember what I said, about keeping quiet."

Her face was burning.

She slammed the door behind her, leaving Hervé with his hands shaking, and Nicolas oblivious to everything but the music.

/

There was one thing that Sissi Delmas quite often forgot about, and that was that her life at Kadic Academy wasn't the only one laced through with problems.

On this occasion she was leaving school and heading to the factory the usual way, the route which her feet followed now without her even needing to think about it. Every there-and-back resulted in a new record time.

She stuck to the shadows cast by the school building, ducking beneath windows just in case a passing teacher should see her and ask awkward questions about where she was going and why she was on her own. These days she avoided the gymnasium where Ulrich and the Ishiyama girl practised Pencat Silat nearly every evening. Yumi would walk home later and Ulrich would possibly accompany her. Sissi couldn't bear to think about them alone and close in the twilight, even if what happened there was the result of her own traiterous imagination.

The grass rustled, giving way to the sound of footsteps on gravel.

Sissi gasped, the noises wrenching her back to the present. Her phone slid from her hand and she just about caught it in time, awkwardly, with both hands.

Holding her breath, she waited.

"Hey, it's Belpois!"

It was a boy's voice, filled with a strange kind of false cheerfulness. There was a lilting, mocking quality to his tone as he stepped into the floodlights illuminating the courtyard and Sissi recognised him as Julien Xao, a substitute on the football team. Strolling after him, hands in his pockets, was another boy – Matthieu - with mousy hair which hung in bangs over his forehead.

"Hello Julien," said Jérémie.

Sissi strained to see around the wall without being spotted, identifying the skinny blond boy with his fists clenched around the twin straps of his backpack.

Sissi had never heard Jérémie Belpois speak before except for the few, rare, times he answered a question in class. Now his voice was quiet and wary like an animal edging around a trap. Mattheiu and Julien stepped closer, Julien reaching out a hand to smack Jérémie companionably on the back. Weighed down by his book-laden rucksack, Jérémie stumbled.

"Belpois, how's it going?" Matthieu asked.

Jérémie mumbled something which Sissi didn't quite catch, and Julien nudged him impatiently in the side. Jérémie shrunk away.

"Speak up, Belpois! You're like a mouse."

"Yeah, a little homework-doing mouse."

Julien and Matthieu laughed uproariously, as though the non-joke was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. Sissi watched the scene unfold with growing curiosity. Nothing had really happened, just yet.

"So, where are you scurrying off to, Belpois?" pressed Julien.

The answer was mumbled, monosyllabic. "Library."

"Ooh, the _library_. You read all the books in the school library already? Bet that's why you're never around. You're always just reading or something. Do you ever do anything actually important?"

"I like studying," Jérémie replied, still carefully toneless.

Julien seemed to be the one doing most of the talking. "Who actually likes studying?" he sneered. "Don't you ever do anything else?"

Jérémie had barely moved this whole time. Sissi noted the way his eyes kept flickering to the side; she thought he might have seen her, until she realised that he was probably just looking to escape. Julien and Matthieu crowded him however, and it seemed the bespectabled boy had no choice but to humor them.

"I like building robots," he offered meekly.

Julien and Matthieu seemed genuinely interested at this.

"Robots, huh?" said Matthieu, brushing hair from his eyes as he stepped closer. "Like huge, fighting ones you see on t.v.?"

"Just... miniatures," Jérémie replied. The other two boys were evidently disappointed and Jérémie's shoulders slumped.

"Little robots are _boring_. But hey, let's see 'em."

"Huh?"

Quicker than Jérémie could react, Julien had torn the backpack from his shoulders and set it heavily on the ground. Something inside made a noise like breaking and Jérémie bit his lip, wringing his hands as he tried to edge close enough to get it back.

"Books, books, notebooks..." Julien rifled through, tossing things onto the floor. "Do you even have any- Oh, hey! Matt, look at this!"

Matthieu reached out eagerly for the tiny contraption, turning it over in his hands. Jérémie reached out for it but Matthieu, much taller, held it out of his reach. He yelled as Julien wrestled it from his friend's grasp and proceeded to press all the buttons, causing levers to rise and lights to flash.

"Hey, this is cool!"

"Julien, please-"

"Shove off Belpois, I'm just looking!"

"Here Julien, I didn't even get to see it. Let me-"

"Guys," Jérémie interrupted again, "I need to get going-"

They ignored him in favour of arguing over who got to hold the robot. The two boys grappled, yelling and laughing, and uncaring of the muddy footprints they left on Jérémie's scattered things. He hovered near them, waiting.

From the angle at which he stood, Sissi was able to see his face clearly. She had never paid any attention to Belpois before, always assumed him to be one of those kids who got good grades but only by constantly worrying about it and spending hours holed up in the library. The few times she had glimpsed him at lunch it was never seated with friends but instead on his own on a smaller table. He didn't look altogether too different here than the other times she had seen him – tired eyes behind thick black glasses, terrible posture, so skinny that his blue turtleneck sagged and bunched up at the sleeves.

Julien shouted something, then _SMASH-_

The robot had flown in a wide arc through the air, to break into dozens of pieces at Jérémie's feet.

"See what you've done, Matthieu?" Julien chided, laughing as he punched his friend lightly on the arm. "Now Belpois' gotta make us a new one!"

Jérémie was already on his hands and knees, gathering up the pieces along with his fallen books. Julien and Matthieu exchanged looks before turning to slink away, bored now that their toy was broken. They had forgotten all about Jérémie by the time they got to the school doors, sneering and joking about something else.

Sissi remained in the shadows for a moment, watching the small, lonely figure of Jérémie Belpois hold up a notebook with half its pages now torn out.

He was okay now, right? They had left him alone. He was free to go to the library and get his extra studying done, or whatever. He'd probably think she was weird for helping him, and he would know that she had seen everything up until that point, that she had stood there, without a word.

She was late to her meeting with Aelita.

This... it was none of her business, anyway.

Had she strayed any closer to Jérémie, had she not instead hurried to the factory, she might have heard the telltale sniffles as the boy huddled on the cold ground and began to cry.

/

_Estimated period of consciousness: seventeen days, twenty two hours, forty nine minutes ._

_Currently testing capabilities. All systems functioning normally. Tower activations tested and fully functional._

_Have not yet located Creator. The other survives, moving between Towers. Attempts to eliminate have so far been unsuccessful._

_Collected data regarding Earth is undergoing analysis. New technologies since last time. Developments positive. Continue to facilitate connections to Earth._

_Human visits the factory frequently. Subject identified as 'Sissi Delmas'. Intentions currently unknown. Does not seem to be operating the supercomputer to its fullest extent. Reasons indiscernible._

_Results inconclusive._

_Will allow more time for observation._


	4. System Errors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The novels mentioned in this chapter are all real titles, connected by a common theme.

Sunlight poured in through the windows of Kadic, bringing with it a thick drowsiness whose tendrils wound around the students of Suzanne Hertz's class and lowered their heads gently to their desks.

Suzanne herself sat framed between two pillars of exercise books, one pile slowly diminishing as the other grew and the texts made the transition from 'ungraded' to, satisfyingly, 'graded'. She need only occasionally glance up to reprimand her students when the noise level grew from quiet buzz to headache-inducing clamour; a few stern words and the talking subsided into awkward stage whispers, reigned back in like the ebb of a tide. The class had just settled upon a fresh wave of quiet and even Suzanne longed for coffee; the sleepiness seemed contagious, somehow.

Ulrich rubbed his eyes. With monumental concentration he refocused his gaze on his notebook, his nose almost pressed to the page as his grip tightened stubbornly on his pencil. His messy scrawl noted down with the care the details of their experiment but as he cast a glance to his side he saw, with a twinge of irritation, that Sissi was merely resting her chin on her hands, staring off into space. Her headband had been pressing uncomfortably at her temples and now lay forgotten on the desk. She looked younger without it, her hair sweeping freely over her cheeks and framing the odd pattern of freckles that spread either side of her nose.

"Hey, Sissi," he said. His voice was hoarse with disuse. She blinked slowly and shuffled to close the distance between them. Ulrich's nose crinkled as he was hit with a waft of sweet, but slightly overbearing, perfume. When she smiled and tucked her hair coyly behind her ear, he couldn't quite resist the urge to roll his eyes.

"Yes, Ulrich?"

Her smile irritated him more than it had any right to, really. Odd's dog had been scratching and whimpering all night and the noise had snagged in Ulrich's brain, chasing away any chance of sleep. His fist tightened further around his pencil.

"Let's do some work, yeah? You're just kind of... sitting there." Then, with unnecessary spitefulness, "Use your brain for once."

Her face fell, the prettiness lost to a scowl that didn't suit her. Beneath her make-up, Sissi flushed with the self-concious humiliation of being caught out.

"Hmph," she said.

This quiet exchange sparked another round of conversation amongst the class; snatches of muttered phrases rising like puffs of smoke from all parts of the room, each conversation being the cue and the shield beneath which the others could take place. As the noise level crept upward once more, Sissi turned back to her plant diagram and dragged her eraser over a drawing of a leaf cell that hadn't come out quite right. She pressed too hard and hissed in frustration as the paper crumpled beneath her hand.

Concentration was proving difficult. Sissi saw the telltale signs of sleeplessness in Ulrich and forgave him the insult, feeling acute sympathy as she stifled a yawn under her hands. She'd been thinking about Aelita, truthfully. It was as though, these days, the planes of her thoughts were worn into thin grooves, her musings and concerns flowing perpetually down the same narrow paths. Aelita, computers, what all of it meant. There was also a sense of foreboding which lurked on the edges of her consciousness and hunted her down when she closed her eyes to sleep – her dreams were distorted and abstract, fragments of thought winding around one another, a tangle of thorny rose bushes with no distinct beginning or end and which, when she reached out to touch them, jolted her back instead into wakefulness.

Ulrich had returned to diligently copying notes on the nitrogen cycle into his notebook. The sunflowers they were growing for the project were sprouting their first optimistic shoots over on the classroom windowsill and Sissi thought he'd turned to look at them, but realised he was sneaking jealous glances from the corner of his eye to where Odd Della Robbia and Paul Gaillard were suppressing their laughter amongst a pile of discarded paper planes.

Sissi smoothed out her crumpled notepaper and sighed. Whilst Ulrich returned to his work – which was apparently more interesting than her – she surveyed the room. Odd and his partner had drawn the attention of Mrs Hertz; another minute more and someone was going to be dismissed from the room, or at the very least separated. The mingled buzz of conversations hit another volume level, as the other students worked on their projects with varying degrees of co-operation. Those lucky enough to be paired with friends were even enjoying themselves, despite the tenuous energy of the classroom.

At the very front of the class Sissi spied two blond heads bent closely toegether as Jérémie quietly explained something to Heidi, whose expression was slowly slipping into one of glazed-over vacancy. There was no hostility there, though; Sissi doubted Heidi had it in her to be mean to anyone. She found herself immensely relieved that Jérémie had ended up with a good partner, someone whose co-operation with Jérémie held no ulterior motive. Jérémie too, seemed tired, Sissi couldn't help but notice. It was impossible not to look at him and see beneath his quiet exterior the events of that one night, which seemed ever clearer in her mind even as time wore on and diminished it to a thing of the past, at least as far as Sissi was concerned.

Stomach laced through with something like guilt, she forced herself to focus on her diagram, smoothed out the piece of paper one more time and redrew in the lines she had just erased.

She purposefully avoided looking in Jérémie's direction for the remainder of the class, not that he noticed.

By the time the bell heralded the end of the lesson, Sissi had three diagrams completed and one page of variations on "Mrs Stern", "Mrs Sissi Stern", and "Elisabéth Stern" in an impressive array of cursive and colours in the back of her notebook. Standard fair for morning science classes. Ulrich filed away his things, wordlessly scraping back his chair as he did so. Whilst his peers were preparing for a rather more relaxed afternoon, the weighty sense of dread in Ulrich's stomach had him feeling more like a prisoner awaiting execution. Throughout the class he'd been thinking about it and come to the conclusion he didn't have a choice. Sissi had just hoisted her bag onto her shoulder when he cleared his throat.

"Sissi."

Her heart skipped a beat; she spun on her heel, flashed him that same winning smile.

"Ulrich, dear," she said, persistent in her endearments and, irritatingly, unphased by his earlier dimissiveness, "What's up?"

"Uh. We're running out of time to work on this project in class, you know. And neither of us seems to be getting anything done."

It was true; the slow drag of the first academic term had, all at once it seemed, gained momentum. There was talk of end-of-term tests; the leaves had begun to turn and the first glimmers of Hallowe'en merchandise began to turn up quietly in the corners of shop fronts. Ulrich felt stretched, worn thin, fighting an upwards current of permanent lethargy. Things always seemed harder as the nights grew longer; he ached for summer, the long, slow, warm days where time seemed immaterial, fluid, away from school's rigid calendar.

Sissi bit her lip. "Yeah," she said. She surprised him with her frankness. "Sorry. I did get some of the diagrams done, and I have been watering the flower thingies every day. Well, almost." Her shoulders rose and fell, a quick shrug. "We're ahead of Odd and Paul, at least?"

Ulrich's lip twitched slightly. It wasn't quite a smile, but Sissi took what she could get, embraced a momentary warm flow of triumph. It was enough to crack open the hard shell of tension encasing them, and enough to give Ulrich the resolve to say what he'd been needing to say.

"I thought we could get together later if you wanted. Maybe do a little more work together outside of class. We really need to," he conceded. "My dad will kill me if I start out the year failing a project." Much as the idea filled him with dread, and he'd shot her down so thoroughly last time the topic had come up, panic now had Ulrich swallowing his pride. He grimaced. Beneath this converstion was maths homework he hadn't done and at least three abandoned essay outlines. And always, his father's face, disappointed and unyielding.

Sissi nodded. "Yeah, Daddy hasn't been too pleased with me lately either. Ugh, parents." Comfortable side-by-side on this common ground, Sissi felt a little bolder. "There's a café I like in town that's open late. We could walk there together if you want, I just need some time ready, that's all."

Ulrich gave his own lopsided shrug of affirmation. "Sure. Make sure you bring your notes." He indicated to the papers still littering the desk. "This is going to be a productive afternoon," he warned her.

"Okay, okay." She smirked, wrapping a strand of hair around her finger. "You do owe me a date. If it has to be a study date, I guess I can work with that. See you later!"

There was a definite spring in her step as she swept her things into her arms and left the room, flicking her hair over her shoulder. Ulrich appraised her for a moment, wondering if it would be as bad as he anticipated.

She had forgotten her headband. Ulrich spotted it as his eyes fell to the desk; he hesitated over it, then reached down and put it in his pocket. When he left the empty classroom he saw Odd leaning by the doorframe, the lingering result of shameless eavesdropping. He smirked, and Ulrich pushed past him with a scowl.

It was the last of the nice days, though no one knew it yet. The evening would be chilly as the sun sunk into lavender clouds, but for now Sissi's shadow was long and the air warm on her face as she made her way through the park with her school bag bouncing at her hip.

She couldn't wait to share the good news with Aelita. She had a date with Ulrich Stern!

She repeated that to herself silently, giggling as the statement registered as solid fact in her brain. They would work hard on the project and in the meantime, away from distractions like school and the scathing remarks of Odd Della Robbia, she'd be able to shine, show Ulrich her true self. She'd show him she could be fun, and interesting – she was interested in football to an extent, there was the first fledgling common ground, and they could probably hit on some movies they both liked. It was going to be great, and nothing could ruin Sissi's day except perhaps-

"Sissi!"

She cringed, whipping around, armed with her fiercest glare. Hervé Pichon, jogging awkwardly and already slightly out of breath, hurried to close the gap between them. Nicholas ambled up behind him.

"Listen, uh, hi Sissi," he began, hands like flittering birds as they rung together and then came apart. "I was just wondering if we could talk about that programme thing you... found. It looked really interesting, and I-"

Sissi heaved a sigh, frustration turning inwards towards herself. She knew it had been a bad idea to trust Hervé. The Sissi Fanclub – a flattering idea until she learned it was comprised of only two people – had turned out to be bad enough, and now he seemed to linger constantly on the edge of her peripheral vision, a pale presence that emerged every time she rounded a corner, an awkward ghost. The only time Sissi managed to avoid him these days was when she was alone in her room, or in gym class, which he and Jérémie Belpois put an incredible amount of effort into avoiding.

"You said it was stupid, remember?" she said haughtily.

"Well, it seemed kind of far-fetched at first, and I still don't really know if I got it right, what I thought it did. Now though, I'm thinking, what if you took it to Mrs Hertz? Or, even..." His face flushed with excitement, "We could even try and send it to some theoretical physics expert! We could get famous! Imagine it, 'the Pichon Law of Time Reversion'. Or, 'Pichon-Delmas Law', I guess."

"Hervé, it's just a stupid thing I found." Sissi tried to keep her voice level. "I wanted you to look at it, you did, that's it."

"You said we could hang out after," Hervé said petulantly. "And it's been ages since then. I get the impression you're avoiding me."

"Whatever. I'm busy right now, anyway." She turned away from him.

"Where are you going?" He attempted to stand imposingly in her way but Sissi simply stepped around him and, with the advantage of longer legs and greater fitness, she began to pull away from him in quick strides. Hervé struggled to keep up, breath escaping him in sharp gasps. "Hey, Sissi!"

"I'm going for a walk!" she snapped. "Leave me alone, Hervé! For someone so smart you sure can be stupid, can't you see I'm not interested?"

He relented for a moment; within seconds she was a good few yards ahead of him.

Hervé Pichon was curious, stubborn and persistent. But he was also extremely unathletic, and knew when to cut his losses, so with sweat sticking uncomfortably to his back, he breathed deeply and sloped towards Kadic Academy once more.

There was a sudden tap on his shoulder. Hervé turned to the solemn face of Nicholas, who he'd almost forgotten was there.

"Hey, Nic." Annoyed as he was, he couldn't bring himself to be irritated with his best friend.

When Nicholas spoke it was slow, pondering, dream-like, the opposite to Sissi's rash impatience. "I was just thinking. It's a nice day, Hervé, we don't have to sit inside."

Hervé sighed. Despite everything they had in common – mostly that was simply a dorm room and 'being alone', but there were a few other things – they would always be divided on one basic idea, that being that Nicholas loved the outdoors whereas Hervé preferred to be inside at any opportunity. On the other hand...

"We might bump into Sissi when she's on her way back, I guess," Hervé said. "Okay," he added, mind made up. "We'll actually go and do something. What did you have in mind?"

Nicholas grinned.

"I have a spare fishing rod you can borrow. Let's go down to the river."

"Should be great fun..."

Hervé made a mental note to bring a book along with him, too.

/

"I'm going to take a nap," was all Ulrich said as he burst into his and Odd's shared dormitory. His room mate was sprawled on his bed. The huge headphones clamped against his ears overspilled with music, crackly muffled beats thumping almost loudly enough to make the walls shake and Ulriched wondered how Odd hadn't gone deaf.

"HEY ULRICH."

"Argh!" Ulrich threw his hands up in despair. "Turn that thing off, why don't you?"

"WHAT WAS THAT, BUDDY?"

Ulrich leaned over and pulled the headphones down from Odd's ears, flinging them onto the pillow. "If I can hear that racket when I'm not even wearing the headphones, it's a sign you've probably got it turned up too loud."

Odd leaned over and, at the press of a button, the music faded. "I guess it was a little loud."

"Yeah, right. You're as bad as that dog of yours. Kept me awake all night, sniffing and scratching."

"Aw, poor Kiwi." At the sound of his name, the dog scurried out from beneath Ulrich's bed and pressed his curious wet nose to Odd's ankles. Odd scooped him up, a now familiar gesture, and scratched his ears. "He's taking a little longer to get settled than I thought. Anyway." Odd grinned at Ulrich. "You should rest up for your big date. Finally decided to take the plunge, huh? I know you said you would, but you've been pretty determined to keep her at arm's length lately."

"It's only thanks to Hertz and her stupid project. I don't know why it takes two people to grow a bunch of sunflowers, anyway. And with all the other homework we've been getting, it keeps going out of my head." He paused for a moment, taking the time to kick off his shoes and lie on his bed. It was blissfully dark and quiet behind his eyelids. He was so tired. "So why are you so invested in me and Sissi, anyway?"

For the first time, Odd actually stopped to consider it. "Boredom, I guess," he said. "Weird how you can be at a boarding school with hundreds of students, yet it's so tough to find people to hang out with. Guess I'm taking a little longer than I thought to settle, too." He held Kiwi up to his face as he said this and examined his likeness thoughtfully, the dog's dark eyes serving as tiny, twin mirrors.

Odd had a sensation suddenly, like the world, even this box room, was too big for him. He shook his head, grinned in an attempt to restore his usual joviality, but it didn't matter – shortly after posing his question, Ulrich had fallen asleep.

Odd curled up with Kiwi close to his chest and, with an empty expression, traced out imaginary patterns on the ceiling.

/

"Aelitaaaa!" Sissi practically sang as she swung herself up into the supercomputer's chair. Aelita appeared instantly, seemingly relieved to see another face. It had been a long day, poring through databases.

"Hey Sissi. I like your hair."

Sissi ran her hand through it, pleased. "Thank you! I've lost my headband, I barely even noticed. I took it out in class, morning lessons were so slow you wouldn't believe." Despite this, a stubborn smile pulled at the corner of Sissi's mouth. She no longer bothered to repress it as she relaxed into the chair. Away from the sunlight her eyes took some time to adjust, but even the greenish glow of the factory couldn't temper her delighted expression.

"You're very cheerful today," Aelita teased.

The good news threatened to burst from Sissi, held back just long enough for her to contemplate whether she still had reservations about pouring her heart and soul into Aelita. She realised, pleased with herself, that she didn't.

"Oh, Aelita!" Sissi exclaimed. "I'm so excited. I have a date!"

This was another thing Sissi needed to explain.

"It's not quite a date, really, it's more like a study date, but it's pretty close. A date is, uh... when two people like each other, and they hang out. Though, I'm not so sure Ulrich likes me, really... I mean, I don't know, it's pretty complicated."

Aelita waited for Sissi to elaborate. The dark-haired girl found herself getting more and more flustered. It was one thing to turn this over in her mind as often as she did, yet another altogether to shape it into words, pressed from her mouth to the listening ear of a female cofident.

"This is a huge deal. I've been in love with Ulrich for a long time, you see."

Saying that out loud, rather than scribbling it in her diary, was strange. It was liberating however, to have the words out in the open.

"What does it mean, to be in love?" Aelita asked.

"Love is... when you like someone a lot. When you admire them, and when you want to spend time with them. When you just want to be with them. There's love like when you love your friends and family, and then there's romantic love, and that's the most powerful thing in the world. When two people love each other..." Sissi trailed off, and sighed wistfully. "It's a beautiful thing."

"It sounds wonderful." Aelita had leaned forward further, more enraptured than before, her smile mirroring Sissi's. "So what are you going to do on your date?"

/

Some time later, as Ulrich woke with a dry mouth and a brain replaced with compacted cotton wool and began to pull on a shirt and jeans ("Really," Odd commented cheerfully, "You could at least dress it up a little!"), Sissi threw open her own wardrobe and pulled from it armfuls of clothes, which she cast onto her bed without removing the hangers. For the moment she stood in a loose tank top and shorts, easy to slip in and out of as she tried combinations of prospective outfits.

"Jeans a shirt... or something more feminine?" Sissi mused aloud, holding up a blouse with sheer sleeves and ruffles. All her dresses seemed a little too over the top for a study date. There was her bright pink minidress, which she'd had for a year or so and now fitted a little snugly – this wasn't a bad thing in terms of what it showed off, but was in terms of how uncomfortable she'd be, sat hunched over a table in it for hours on end.

Her mind drifted to an imaginary scenario as she lined up outfits, hanging them from wardrobe door handles and spreading them out on the floor, holding pieces up against herself in the mirror. In it, Aelita sat at the foot of her bed, possibly with a mobile phone in one hand (pink, it would be pink, and Aelita would have pierced ears, two in the lobes and one at the top of her ear), her legs folded under her, absent-mindedly tossing Sissi's heart-shaped pillow up in the air and catching it again. In this imaginary scenario, Aelita was... Sissi scrambled to fill in the gap... Aelita was a new student, swept in mysteriously from Canada, and was slowly discovering all the wonders Paris had to offer. She would offer invaluable input on Sissi's outfit, just like all those groups of girl friends did in the movies.

Sissi indulged the daydream for a little while, wished for the millionth time she could pull Aelita up anywhere, on her phone or a laptop screen here in her room. She looked around her, reminded herself that the room was empty, and sighed.

Alone, Sissi decided on jeans with the blouse, and chunky-heeled boots which weren't too difficult to walk in.

There was a comforting routine in getting ready. With the pressure of choosing clothes now lifted, Sissi was free to tend to her hair which snaked in damp curls around her neck and shoulders. She brushed it absently, reaching for her hairdryer with one hand and plugging it in.

She couldn't have guessed what would happen next, nor, if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes, would she have believed it.

As the plug pressed snugly into the socket, there was a fleeting second between normality and danger; from that gap, blue sparks writhed like live eels. There emerged, too, smoke, but no smoke-smell – Sissi convinced herself later that she'd imagined this, because it was just too bizarre, but the airy substance was thick grey, almost black, and instead of curling into the air as smoke usually did, it poured from the socket in steady streams and faded when it hit the carpet.

The hairdryer in her hand shook, imbued with a fierce energy, and the electricty writhed, itself a wire, snaking around the cord of her hairdyer and reaching out hungrily for her arm. Sissi reacted just in time, hurling the hairdryer across the room where it left a series of weblike splinters in her mirror. Some of the static crackled against her skin as she reached for the door, which she flung open in panic and screamed out into the corridor.

"JIM!" Her voice rang shrill with hysteria and repetition- "JIM!"

A flurry of doors opened, heads and shoulders peering out in various states of dress. They lingered uncertainly, sensing a crisis but unable to gauge the level of urgency. At last, a girl disappeared through the main doors at an awkward jog and returned not long afterwards with Jim Moralés in tow.

"What's going on here?" His voiced rang out, reassuringly adult and ordinary.

"I have no idea what happened. My hairdryer just went crazy!" Sissi's heart was still racing, her mind replaying on a loop that fateful split-second of time that separated her from the present moment and another world where she lay lifeless on the floor, the victim of untimely electrocution. Through shallow breaths, it took Sissi a moment to explain. She tried to convey the importance of it, how deeply unsettling the entire thing had been, but one look at the exasperation strewn across Jim's face told her she had failed.

"You're not the only one." Jim wiped sweat from his brow. It was rare to see him quite so stressed – frustrated, sure, but this was a more hard-wearing stress of a man even more overworked than usual. "It's a miracle no one's been seriously injured. The bugs just seem to be getting worse and worse. Damned faulty circuits."

Sissi felt herself pressed to the corner of her own room as Jim bent down to examine the scene. The malfunction had left a blistering scorch mark across the carpet, and there was of course the broken mirror, fragments of which Jim carefully began to pick up and transfer to the wastepaper basket. Sissi, aware of her bare feet, stood well back. She felt dizzy.

"I'm stepping outside for a second, Jim."

She did so, relishing the open space of the girls' corridor. Several girls remained peering around their own doors at the commotion, gaping at Sissi standing there underdressed, with wet hair and a look of shock on her face. She didn't talk to many of them, knew them only by name and face, but relished the attention as they mulled around, hungry for gossip. As the story ran its course however, and it became apparent there was little else to do but stand around and watch Jim try to reset the mains, they drifted back to their rooms, closed the doors behind them and left Sissi alone once more.

It was a surprise then when Jérémie Belpois scurried past, an uncommon site on this particular floor. Sissi took a guess at who he might be avoiding, here in unfamiliar territory. There was a nervous energy about him, a scuttling insect-look with his hunched shoulders and his eyes huge behind his glasses. It took her a second to realise, too, that his arms were clamped possessively around a laptop. To her surprise, she found his name leaving her mouth, a pair of urgent syllables.

"Belpois."

He froze, turned and almost stumbled on his skinny, visible ankles. Like Hervé, he made a quick, cursory glance around the empty corridor as though to double-check that it was in fact Sissi who had addressed him. His eyes flickered briefly to her attire, the thigh-skimming shorts and tank top, and the faintest blush crept over his cheeks as his gaze settled determinedly on his shoes.

"Y-Yeah?" he managed to respond.

"You're good with computers, aren't you?"

He looked up again, eyes lit up with enthusiasm and a hint of indigant pride. "Pretty good, yeah," he admitted. "I could take a look. I'm kind of in a hurry, though..."

Sissi shook her head. "You know what? It doesn't matter."

So much for keeping secrets. At this rate, she was going to blab to the whole school, and she still hadn't told anyone who mattered. It was a silly fear holding her back, she realised, the desire not to tell Ulrich out of a sense of rejection, the inevitable bonding between him and Aelita. Maybe if he didn't bring Della Robbia long, if it was just the two of them... She considered briefly introducing Odd and Aelita, romantically, before she remembered the impracticalities of double-dating when one of the parties was an artifical intelligence; not too mention she would be doing a terrible disservice as a friend by putting Aelita in a situation where she had to put up with Odd.

Sissi realised she had been giving this way too much thought. The tangent ended, brought her abruptly back to the present moment where Jérémie stood, disappointed. "Okay," he said. "If you do need any help..."

"Thanks."

Suddenly the bemused, expression on the boy's face turned to one of stricken panic. Sissi found what prompted the change, and the apparent true source of Jérémie hiding on the girls' floor - Jim Moralés' head appearing around her bedroom door.

"Ah, Belpois!" he boomed. "I thought I heard your voice! Haven't seen you in a single gym class all week, and I'm not about to let you get away with it a minute longer! Except, uh... I just need to take a look at this, and I'll be out in a minute. But don't go wandering off, you hear?"

He disappeared back into Sissi's room. Jérémie exhaled relief at the brief escape.

"What bad luck, just who I came this way to avoid," he muttered.

Sissi quirked an eyebrow at the bespectacled boy, arms folded across her chest, a silent Well, what are you going to do? challenge. He stood for all of a second weighing up his options, torn between a teacher's authority compelling him to stay put and his own self-preservation, before adjusting the laptop in his arms and taking off hurriedly down the corridor, throwing over his shoulder a shy, apologetic smile.

Despite herself, Sissi found herself returning it.

Ulrich had heard about the malfunctioning hairdryer incident, and it was the first thing they discussed when he stepped up to Kadic's gates later that evening, following Sissi's lead. It was growing dark outside and they both hugged their jackets around them closely. Sissi's hair was still a little damp.

"We heard your scream from the next floor," Ulrich commented wryly, as Sissi began to pour out the finer details of what had happened.

"You weren't there. It was terrifying. Like the thing just came to life on its own."

Ulrich laughed. "And that doesn't make you sound crazy at all."

Sissi was indignant. "I'm just saying what happened. Ask Jim, even he thinks it's weird."

"He's stressed out lately," Ulrich noted.

"Tell me about it. He was chasing down Belpois for cutting gym, but his heart didn't even seem to be in it."

They followed the path around a long, winding bend. The town stretched out suddenly before them, a circuit board of bright lights and pattern. It wasn't until he stood here, at the edge of something so utterly normal, that the thought hit Ulrich, appearing in his mind fully formed as though somsone else had placed it there.

"Things have been weird at school lately. Ever since we got back, more or less." He turned to Sissi, fixed her with the full intensity of his gaze. Her breath caught in her throat; when it unstuck, the words lodged behind it came out quickly before Sissi even knew she was saying them.

"Tell me about it, I've had an interesting time of things lately, ever since-"

"Oh?" The stare intensified, questioning. Up close, Sissi could see his eyes had little flecks of darker brown in them.

"Nothing," said Sissi. "Just, like you say. Things have been weird."

The café was upon them suddenly, welcomed them in with warm lights and the permeating smell of hot chocolate and worn leather sofas. They took a large rounded table near the window and sat heavily down on squashy cushions. In time they had drinks, and settled down to business. Ulrich, with determined focus, began to spread an array of books and papers onto the table. His hand brushed something as he delved into his pocket in pursuit of pens, drew it out with vague surprise until memory caught up with him.

"Oh, here," he said, holding out Sissi's headband. "You left this in class."

She took it gratefully, pushed it back into place so that her hair was smoothed back once more from her forehead. The soft look to her face lessened slightly, the light bringing more attention to her darkly outlined eyes.

"Thanks. I did wonder where that had gone." She gave the kind of pause one does when they're hesitating to add something else and then decide the better of it. Ulrich couldn't guess; at the least he would never have guessed, "Aelita said it was a nice change, having my hair down like that."

He couldn't breach the topic without sounding vain, there was no way around it, but she had seemed less and less occupied with him lately. It was a relief, a weight lifted, but it did give him cause to wonder. Maybe she liked someone else? Odd?

He laughed aloud at this, and Sissi gave him a curt look from over her glass.

"What's so funny?" she demanded.

"Nothing!"

"You'd better not be laughing at me, Ulrich."

"No need to get so defensive."

"I wouldn't have to get so defensive if you and Odd and everyone else weren't such jerks all the time."

You don't help matters yourself, Ulrich wanted to shoot back, but the need to get his schoolwork done and not breach an argument won out. He retreated into one of his textbooks. Sissi, likewise, thought about pressing to find out what Ulrich was laughing at her for this time, but thought the better of it.

Ulrich shifted aside some papers and came upon an unfamiliar book angled towards Sissi's end of the table.

"What's that you're reading?"

Lifted accidentally from the pile of things in Sissi's bag was a book, presumably taken from Kadic's school library, its pages yellowed with age and many of them folded in different sized creases at the corners. Ulrich leaned forward to peer at the spine, reading out the title slowly.

"Feersum Endjinn. Sounds interesting." It was more a doubtful question than anything, and Sissi nodded before she could stop herself, almost immediately after turning to rummage aimlessly through her bag.

"It's nothing really," she replied with forced casualness. "It's just some dorky science fiction book I found in the library. I thought if Daddy thought I was reading something other than magazines, he'd be happier about my grades and stuff."

Ulrich would have been willing to accept that, almost did in fact, had it not been for the copies of other books he spied in her open bag later that night, as they left the café. The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Idlewild, old novels with unfamiliar front covers, nothing he recognised from Kadic's literature syllabus.

Were it not for the glossy magazine and the bulging makeup bag edged in amongst the other things, Ulrich might have thought he was speaking to a completely different person. He had the sense that maybe he was; that this strange new reading material, the preoccupied thoughts, were slowly edging out the Sissi Delmas that he knew and gently ushering in a new and undeniably intriguing girl in her place. This was a thought that stayed with him, long after time became concentrated, narrowed and shaped into an evening of study.

At last: "So now all we have to do is make sure our sunflowers don't die, and write up a conclusion. Unless you can think of anything else?"

Sissi scanned her handwritten list, with its ticks and crossing outs in bright pink ink. "That just about covers it, I think. I'm going to neaten up some of my diagrams and then we're done. A whole project on plant life and photosynthesis and the nitrogen cycle and it's only taken us..." she glanced at her phone for the time, surprised. "Hours and hours!"

"We should head back," Ulrich said, already standing up. He moved slowly, seemed content, or at least more relaxed than this morning. The pressure of school, and, imperceptibly, the pressure of Sissi Delmas, had lessened just slightly.

Sissi stretched out languidly across the table.

"I guess so."

/

It was quiet, as usual, within the tower.

Aelita sat with her hands on her folded knees, leaning forward intently to study the small interface. She had a huge project for today, and was taking a break to reexamine footage of the monsters, having found an option to replay, on a small screen, any occurrences within Lyoko. Sissi had mentioned something offhand about sights and sounds triggering memories, and Aelita wanted to know if this was the case.

She studied the monsters – they were unnamed so far; Sissi had proposed ideas but couldn't think of anything she deemed suitable, except perhaps 'Blocks' for the block-shaped ones, and that was so obvious as to be completely stupid – and tried to think about them in terms of Earth animals that Sissi had named. She had also returned to the Forest, trying to determine if the sensations surrounding the place were anything significant. She felt an affinity with it, but was it only because this was the place where she had woken up? The Ice sector felt different but also sentimental. The Desert gave her feelings of freedom, possibly due to its wide-open landscapes.

As part of the huge task she had set herself, combing through Lyoko's databases, Aelita had also come at last upon the Mountain sector. For reasons she couldn't explain, the notion that the mountaineous region existed made perfect sense to her. That they existed here, purpley-grey towering things, their tops hidden in thick clouds and their many platforms layered like cake, felt like the obvious solution to some long-forgotten puzzle. Sharing the discovery with Sissi that afternoon, Aelita had insisted she wouldn't go out there until her friend returned. And yet, as she sat there within the tower, the urge to venture beyond its walls was overwhelming.

Aelita did like the towers, in a way. She found their smoke reassuring, soft pale fronds of it curled around each tall fortress, like a protective spell. Inside, they had a calming effect as well as a healing one, settling Aelita's mind as the blue glow submerged her like a warmth bath and restored her life points.

"Oh, Sissi," Aelita said to the silence. "I hope you're having a wonderful time on your date. But I do wish you'd come back."

She stood, stretched lightly, and began to pace the small ringed platform. Calming and safe as the towers were, one could only take so much stillness.

"I could step out, just for a moment."

The thing with Lyoko was that it called out to her.

Since the very beginning, Aelita could not articulate this to Sissi. It was too abstract; trying to describe it was akin to trying to catch water through spread fingers. Lyoko called out to her, the same way she had clasped her hands and fallen to her knees and begged it for help – in return it ached to be explored, cried out for Aelita's soft touch on its ledges of rock and its mossy trees. Alone for such long spells of time, she began to feel antsy and impatient, her senses straining to satisfy this wordless desire for contact. She suspected on some level, given her origins, a programme played on a loop – felt more though, that there was something instinctive about the whole thing.

"Just one look," Aelita decided at last. "Sorry, Sissi. I'll keep safe, I promise."

She spread her arms, stepped off the tower and embraced the fall.

She slipped out of a tower wall into the Mountains, and from the instance she connected with that solid platform the feeling hit Aelita like a shockwave. She gasped, clutched her hands to her chest; had she a heartbeat, it would have been thrown into frantic sympathy with a sharp thrumming that rang from the ground.

Visibly, there was no difference. The ground didn't shake, the mountains stayed steadfast and unyielding. Yet there was something wrong here, an alien presence unlike anything in the other sectors. These surges of power beneath the surface of everything, so strong that Aelita half expected anything she touched to shoot sparks upward into her fingers.

She named them without even really naming them, the thought instead arising in her mind as though it had always been there, simply waiting to be dislodged so it could float to the surface. Pulsations, she thought. They had a certain pattern to them; the sensation came to her softly, as though she was experiencing the end ripples from a spot far away where a stone had been thrown into a pool.

"A breakthrough? Or another mystery to solve?" she whispered to herself. Then, louder, "Sissi! Sissi where are you?"

She hovered, helpless. Two options seemed equally tempting - wait for Sissi, as she had said she would... or go and explore? Despite her better judgement, her knowledge of monsters and her anxiety about the unknown, the call of Lyoko seemed almost impossible to ignore. Aelita's foot took one slow step almost without her notice; after which, like moving down a steep slope, the next step and each subsequent one became easier. Before she knew it she was walking again, footsteps providing a steady rhythmic pace against the rapid, frenetic one that had overtaken Lyoko.

She couldn't wait. Aelita had to find the source of the pulsations, was drawn inexplicably to whatever had cast them. Her eyes strained towards the horizon, hungry for its source.

A moment later, she had found it. In the distance, pressed against the open sky, a minute ember glowed on the tip of a thin, charred matchstick.

The sight was so wrong, the antithesis of her beloved fortresses, that the fresh wave of weakness in Aelita's knees was nothing to do with the pulsations and everything to do with fear.

It was a tower, turned red.


End file.
